Authentication in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Deployment of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is growing as they serve advantageously to enlarge wired backbones, especially in country side areas where the cost of introducing a wired network to few costumers is very expensive. WMNs can also be used as home networks to interconnect all the home devices together with no constraints for the traffic to go through a hub. WMNs are constructed as community networks. That is, a community peer to peer network is built within the WMN, and it fully supports local traffic transferring between stations of the community thanks to some multi-hop routing protocols. As mesh networks are spreading quickly, providing a reliable authentication service is becoming compulsory. Most of the current authentication solutions rely on the 802.1X standard and the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) or on ID-based cryptography. They refer either to a public/private key pair or to a secret shared between the two authenticating stations. We propose to review, in this chapter, the most known authentication protocols that have been proposed for the authentication of wireless mesh network stations either in IEEE standards or in research literature