Secure and efficient routing in highly dynamic WLAN mesh networks
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Date
2015
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Abstract
Recent advances in embedded systems, energy storage, and communication interfaces,
accompanied by the falling prices of WLAN routers and a considerable
increase in the throughput of a WLAN (IEEE 802.11), have facilitated the proliferation
of WLAN Mesh Network (WMN) applications. In addition to their
current deployments in less dynamic community networks, WMNs have become
a key solution in various highly dynamic scenarios. For instance, WMNs are intended
to interconnect self-organized, cooperative, and small Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles (UAVs) in a wide range of applications, such as emergency response, environmental
monitoring, and ad-hoc network provisioning. Nevertheless, WMNs
still face major security challenges as they are prone to routing attacks. Consequently,
the network can be sabotaged and, in the case of UAV-WMN-supported
missions, the attacker might manipulate payload data or even hijack UAVs.
Contemporary security standards, such as the IEEE 802.11i and the security
mechanisms of the IEEE 802.11s mesh standard, are vulnerable to routing attacks,
as experimentally shown in this research. Therefore, a secure routing
protocol is indispensable for making feasible the deployment of WMNs in critical
scenarios, such as UAV-WMN-assisted applications. As far as the author of
this thesis knows, none of the existing research approaches for secure routing in
WMNs have gained acceptance in practice due to their high overhead or strong
assumptions.
In this research, a new approach, which is called Position-Aware, Secure, and
Efficient mesh Routing (PASER), is proposed. This new proposal defeats more
attacks than the IEEE 802.11s/i security mechanisms and the well-known, secure
routing protocol Authenticated Routing for Ad-hoc Networks (ARAN), without
making restrictive assumptions. It is shown that PASER achieves —in realistic
UAV-WMN scenarios— similar performance results as the well-established, nonsecure
routing protocols Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) combined with
the IEEE 802.11s security mechanisms. Two representative scenarios are considered:
(1) on-demand ubiquitous network access and (2) efficient exploration of
sizable areas in disaster relief. The performance evaluation results are produced
using an experimentally validated simulation model of WMNs, realistic mobility
patterns of UAVs, and an experimentally derived channel model for the air-to-air
WMN link between UAVs. The findings of this evaluation are justified by the
route discovery delay and the message overhead of the considered solutions.
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Keywords
WLAN mesh networks, Secure routing, Routing Attacks, IEEE 802. 11s, IEEE 802. 11i, PASER, ARAN, HWMP, BATMAN, UAV