Security in Wireless Mesh Networks: Challenges and Solutions

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is an emerging technology that has developed a lot these years. WMN has the feather of self-organization, distributed structure. The main topological characteristic of WMN is that there are only one or several node connecting to the infrastructure network as gateway and all other nodes connect to the gateway through the relay of the neighboring nodes, and then connect with the internet. WMN represents a whole new network concept and because of the nature of wireless and multi-hop, the security vulnerabilities have become crucial problems. Therefore, specified security mechanism should be introduced. The research on the key security theories and detection to intrusion of WMN has become of great significance both theoretically and empirically. This article starts from the introduction of the basic organization and characteristics of WMN, presenting major security problems and key security approach gradually to the reader, and concludes with the comparison of several secure routing protocols.