A New Security Mechanism for Dynamic Channel Assignment in Wireless Mesh Networks

Channel assignment is the key problem in the research of the next-generation wireless mesh networks (WMN) in which each node may be equipped with multiple radio interfaces, each capable of running in one of several modes and one of several channels. Recent research indicates that the use of channel assignment technology could reduce the interference and increase the throughout of WMN effectively. However, most proposed channel assignment algorithms for WMN made assumption that all the mesh nodes are trustable and cooperating to achieve the high network performance, which is infeasible in practice. In this paper we propose a new security mechanism for dynamic distributed channel assignment (DCA) in WMN. The comparison and analysis in this paper demonstrates its feasibility, efficiency, robust and security in protecting WMN from several related security attacks on DCA.