A Survey of Secure Routing Protocols for Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh network (WMN) is the subsequent pace in the development of wireless architecture which provides wireless internet connectivity in an extensive topographical area.Key advantages of WMNs include simple installation, low cost, self-connectivity of nodes, network flexibility and discovery of newly added nodes.WMN is used to integrate different types of networks such as the Internet, cellular, Wi-Fi networks, Wi-Max, sensor networks, etc.The Gateway and bridging functions of the mesh routers enable them to form a hybrid network.In WMN, security is a major challenging issue due to its physical channel vulnerability, dynamic change of the topology etc., which necessitates extensive research to design new security protocols for all layers from physical layer to application layer of the protocol stack.Network layer attacks have paramount significance since they may lead to paralyzing a larger scale network services.The major issue in providing seamless services in WMNs is the design of a secure routing protocol.This paper presents a thorough survey of different secure routing protocols for WMN.