Efficient authentication and key management scheme for wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh network (WMN) is considered as one of most emerging field for the research work in today's networking area due to its various approaches available to handle the network resources. Various architectures have been proposed so far and main key challenge for the design of this network is their vulnerability to security attacks. Therefore an efficient key management is required to overcome from such security exploitation such as unauthorised access to the network. WMNs need to be clustered into multiple groups to achieve fast and efficient security mechanism to overcome from security attacks. Therefore, we have proposed a group key agreement protocol based on Diffie-Hellman protocol and digital signature to authenticate the mesh entities within the group. The authentication took place between trusted authority (TA) and mesh clients with efficient communication and computational cost and results in reduction of packet loss by an attacker in wireless network which improves the overall performance of the WMNs. Our experimental result proves that it achieves better communication and computational cost with non-repudiation attack.