A Secure Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol for 802.11s Mesh Network

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) has emerged as a key technology and found a great deal of interest for the researchers in the recent past. Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) is the default path selection (i.e., routing) protocol fully specified in the current draft D.1.06 of 802.11s for WMN. However, security in routing or forwarding functionality is not specified in the standard. As a consequence, HWMP in its current from is vulnerable to various types of routing attacks. In this paper, we propose a secure version of HWMP (SHWMP) that operates similarly to that of HWMP but uses cryptographic extensions to provide authenticity and integrity of routing messages and prevents unauthorized manipulation of mutable fields in the routing information elements. We have shown through analyses and simulation that SHWMP is robust against identified attacks and provides higher packet delivery ratio and incurs little computational and storage overhead to ensure security.