Securing Layer-2 Path Selection in Wireless Mesh Networks

The current draft standard of 802.11s has defined routing for Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) in layer-2 and to differentiate from layer-3 routing, it termed layer-2 routing as path selection. The layer-2 path selection (LPS) mechanism is fully specified in the draft of IEEE 802.11s for WMNs. However, routing with security provision is not specified in the standard. Our study identifies that the current path selection mechanism is vulnerable to various types of routing attacks like flooding, route re-direction, spoofing etc. In this paper, we develop a novel Secure Layer-2 Path Selection (SLPS) mechanism that uses cryptographic extensions to provide authenticity and integrity of routing messages. Particularly, the proposed SLPS prevents unauthorized manipulation of mutable fields in the routing messages. Results from analysis and simulation demonstrate that SLPS protocol is robust against identified attacks and provides higher packet delivery ratio, requires no extra communication cost and incurs little path acquisition delay, computational and storage overhead to accomplish secure path selection.