RePro: A Reputation-based Proactive Routing Protocol for the Wireless Mesh Backbone

Wireless mesh network (WMN) is a promising wireless technology that received more and more researchers´ attention recently. These networks comprise of stationary mesh routers, which essentially serves as the wireless mesh backbone to provide connectivity between the mobile mesh clients. Classical routing protocols developed for typical ad hoc networks, which mainly concentrate on mobility and energy conservation, may incur some problems in the WMN. Many optimizations and extensions of existed protocols are proposed. However, few deal with the characteristics of secure routing. In this paper, we assume WMN is self-policing and the mesh routers are autonomous and selfish. Based on this assertion, a reputation-based proactive routing protocol for the wireless mesh backbone is presented. We propose an extension version of OLSR, which adopts a reputation function as the routing metric. An adaptive reputation management framework is designed and we show how to store, collect and query reputation values in an accurate, secure and efficient manner. The simulation results show that our model performs well in terms of routing performance, end-to-end delay metrics.