Experimental Analysis of Secure Authentication Protocols for WLAN-Based Mesh Networks

The emerging wireless mesh networks (WMN) is a broadband access technology. However, the introduction of multi-hop and self-organization properties of WMN disables the adoption of IEEE 802.11i security scheme which is widely used in WLAN networks. This paper mainly focuses on the studies of secure authentication protocols of mesh security association (MSA) architecture proposed by IEEE 802.11s task group for WLAN-based mesh networks. It first presents the security challenges of WMN, then describes the rationale of the proposed MSA mechanism especially initial MSA authentication protocol, later it gives an implementation of a peer link management (PLM) protocol exchange and designs an approach to incorporate into the net80211 stack of Madwifi driver, which can cooperate with 802.11i user-space clients achieving user authentication of mesh points (MP) and the key management functionality. Finally, the experiment result shows that the PLM protocol implementation will make no significant effect on overall network performance in a single hop test case compared with IEEE802.11i authentication scheme, and concludes that MSA architecture is well suited for security solutions of WLAN based mesh networks.