Security issues in wireless mesh networks

Abstract

With recent advances in wireless technologies such as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems and smart antennas, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have attracted increasing attention as an alternative for large-scale deployment of metropolitan area wireless networks. wireless multihop links between the mesh routers. WMNs share some nice features with wireless ad hoc networks, including self-organization and self-configuration. However, since the mesh routers are either static or with minimal mobility, there exists a predictable infrastructure in WMN. Thus, WMNs have the advantage of being extremely easy to deploy and relatively cheap in terms of both infrastructure and maintenance cost. These desirable features make WMNs an appealing solution for a plethora of applications, such as broadband home networking, community networking, etc. However, there are still several challenges and issues preventing WMNs to be widely deployed in large scales. The first major issue is that the performance (throughput, delay, or packet loss rate) of WMNs drops sharply with increasing number of wireless hops the packets traverse through. The multi-radio, multi-channel technique ( [2], [48]) is being researched to overcome this problem. The second major issue is the lack of an integrated cross-layer solution to provide security in WMNs, which has received meager attention in the literature. Clearly, without a well designed security solution, WMNs are vulnerable to various types of internal and external attacks that may cause significant inconvenience to the users and operators. In this chapter, we will address the security issues in wireless mesh networks. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. In Section 12.2 we discuss the security goals and challenges posed in WMNs. Section 12.3 surveys and analyzes the applicability of existing security techniques to WMNs. In Section 12.4 we point out the open problems in this area. Finally, we conclude this chapter. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. All rights reserved.