Enabling secure resource sharing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a self-configuring, self-organizing and self-healing communications network in a mesh topology. Every node collaborates on establishing routing path to communicate with each other or use the Internet services. Even though WMN increases reliability and provides high bandwidth, selfish or malicious nodes may disrupt the network-wide collaboration and abuse the available network bandwidth; some selfish nodes may not forward other traffic to save their own resource while letting other nodes to forward their traffic, and some malicious nodes may discard, forge and modify packets in transit in order to maximize their own interest. On the other hand, considering that a fraction of nodes in WMN can access to the Internet gateways, we can expect that the nodes in the proximity of the gateways suffer from excessive overload of forwarding traffic since most outgoing traffic passes through such the nodes to reach the gateways. In order to address these two problems, we propose a smart and secure resource sharing scheme based on the identity-based encryption and a load-balancing routing. The scheme allocates the network resource to the nodes according to their contribution to the network-wide collaboration. Also, the scheme can detect malicious or selfish nodes and penalize them. This scheme consequently enhances the network utilization and the load-balancing in WMN.