Privacy Based Optimal Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

User privacy and security have been primary concerns in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) due to their peer-to-peer network topology, shared wireless medium and highly dynamic environment. Nowadays, anonymity has received increasing attention due to the users' awareness of their privacy. Anonymity provides protection for users to enjoy network services without being traced. The multi-hop architecture of WMN lays a foundation for most of the routing attacks like packet dropping and packet misdirecting attacks. In this paper, we propose Privacy Based Optimal Routing (PBOR) which provides security and user anonymity while maintaining communication efficiency in WMN. To address privacy and anonymity, security card based routing scheme is implemented. In order to provide security against packet dropping and misdirecting attacks, strong protection is needed and it can be achieved by enhancing the routing metrics during route discovery. Although there are several schemes are proposed to defend against these attacks, there occurs more routing overhead and delay. To overcome these issues, we propose privacy based optimal routing protocol to provide an optimal path for data transmission. Our implementation results show that the proposed scheme increases the overall performance of the network substantially.