Introduction to advances in trust, security, and privacy for wireless networks

In recent years, wireless networks have become one of the most influential technological accomplishments and pervaded our daily lives in forms of mobile telephony and wireless computing. Due to their rapid development and widespread applications, trust, security, and privacy issues in wireless networks have become very important topics. As a result, there is a grand challenge to build wireless systems and networks in which various applications allow users to enjoy more comprehensive services while preserving trust, security, and privacy at the same time. The accepted papers in this special issue deal with a wide range of important aspects and challenging issues of trust, security, and privacy techniques for wireless networks, and the contents are built on analytical modelling, and experimental and simulation studies. The contributions of these papers are outlined below. In intelligent transportation systems, the cooperation between vehicles and the roadside units is essential to bring these systems to fruition. Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a promising technology to enable communications among vehicles, and between vehicles and roadside units. Eiza et al. propose in their work entitled ‘Investigation of routing reliability of vehicular ad hoc networks’ a new vehicular reliability model to facilitate reliable routing in VANETs. Simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed reliable routing outperforms significantly the well-known ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol in terms of better delivery ratio and less link failures while maintaining a reasonable routing control overhead. Wormhole attack is one of the most severe security threats in wireless mesh networks that can disrupt majority of routing communications when strategically placed. In the paper entitled ‘WRSR: wormhole-resistant secure routing for wireless mesh networks’, Matam and Tripathy