Security Framework for Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are emerging as promising, convenient next generation wireless network technology. There is a great need for a secure framework for routing in WMNs and several research studies have proposed secure versions of the default routing protocol of WMNs. In this paper, we propose a security framework for Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) in WMNs. Contrary to existing schemes, our proposed framework ensures both endto-end and point-to-point authentication and integrity to both mutable and non-mutable fields of routing frames by adding message extension fields to the HWMP path selection frame elements. Security analysis and simulation results show that the proposed approach performs significantly well in spite of the cryptographic computations involved in routing.