Encryption in mobile wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are growing in popularity because of their inherent robustness, versatility, and ease of deployment in situations such as natural or man-made disasters. Another area of potential use for these networks is in physical security systems where they can potentially improve mobile communications, communications with remote locations, temporary communications, and geolocation applications. Since these physical security systems may employ a mobile WMN to transport sensitive or classified information, questions arise as to whether end-to-end encryption would work within a very dynamic WMN. We could not find published data or results concerning this. Therefore, we set out to find whether end-to-end encryption will continue to work through an ever-changing WMN. We examined the behavior of end-to-end encryption when the path through the wireless network changes (that is, when routing is forced through a different intermediate node or nodes) and when traversing a radio frequency (RF) shadow. We especially wished to determine whether a tunnel, as used in software virtual private networks (VPNs) or hardware encryption devices, would survive RF shadow transits and mesh network topology changes. This paper presents an introduction to WMNs, their applicability to physical security systems, our end-to-end encryption experiments, analysis of the results, and our conclusions.