One stone two birds: On the security and routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have been a major research focus in the recent years leading to a profusion of protocol proposals. While most existing implementations address routing aspects, none of the proposals addressing security aspects have gained acceptance in practice, due to their high overhead or strong assumptions. To cope with security issues in current WMN deployments, well-known non-secure routing protocols such as HWMP, BATMAN or OLSR could be combined with the security frameworks of the IEEE802.11s or the IEEE802.11i standards. In this paper, we analyze the impact of both security frameworks on the performance of WMNs in simulation and in a real testbed. Besides, we experimentally show that both frameworks do not mitigate the blackhole and wormhole attacks. In addition, we demonstrate that an efficient secure routing protocol combined with a dynamic key management scheme are inevitable to establish reliable WMNs.