Research On Wireless Mesh Network Security

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is an IP-based wireless broadband access technology. With the multipoint-to-multipoint structure and various features like ad hoc, self-repair, multi-hop cascade, node self-management, mobile broadband and wireless location, WMN has many advantages like large capacity, high-speed rate, and covers wide range, making it to be an effective approach of broadband access. WMN inherits many features of wireless sensor network, leading to the advantage that routing path with less data stream can be automatically selected, which is the key point of multi-hop access. In a sense, WMN is more of a network architecture idea which effectively extends tranditional wireless sensor network in functionality.Though there is no large-scale WMN pilot network in the current, there are some Mesh-based products and experimental WMNs in the market. Security is one of most critical issues in this process. This paper analyzed three major security aspects of WMN based on in-depth research on WMN's basic structure and common application scenaries, including authentication/authorization, communication confidentiality and non-repudiation. Then corresponding WMN security schemes are designed for diminishing these security threats as much as possible. These proposed schemes can serve as a reference for the currently undergoing WMN security research.