Secure multicasting protocols in wireless mesh networks—a survey

Abstract

Security is considered as one of the most significant constraint for the recognition of any wireless networking technology. However, security in wireless mesh networks (WMN) is still in its infancy as little attention has been given to this topic by the research society. WMN is a budding technology that provides low-cost high-quality service to users as the “last mile” of the Internet. Multi-casting is one of the major communication technologies primarily designed for bandwidth (BW) conservation and an efficient way of transferring data to a group of receivers in wireless mesh network. The goal of secured group communication is to ensure the group secrecy property such that it is computationally infeasible for an unauthorized member node to discover the group data. In this article, the comparative study on existing approaches has been carried out; in addition to it, the fundamental security requirements and the various security attacks in the field of secure multicasting in WMN have also been discussed.