Secure group communication in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising technology that offers low-cost community wireless services. Security is critical for the deployment of these services. Previous work focused primarily on MAC and routing protocol security, while application-level security has received relatively little attention. In this paper we focus on providing data confidentiality for group communications in WMNs. We propose a new protocol framework, secure group overlay multicast (SeGrOM), that employs decentralized group membership, promotes localized communication, and exploits the wireless broadcast nature to achieve efficient and secure group communication. We analyze the performance and discuss the security properties of our protocols. We demonstrate through simulations that our protocols provide good performance and incur a significantly smaller overhead than a baseline centralized protocol optimized for WMNs.