Routing management for performance and security tradeoff in wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) support multimedia applications that claim for high level of security and performance simultaneously. However, wireless medium and multihop communication allow the action of attackers that can violate data packets or compromise the routing service, reducing performance and quality of service (QoS) of applications. Even in normal conditions of the network, without the presence of attackers, interferences in the shared wireless medium reduce the overall performance of paths. Such aspects require the development of new routing management approaches to address security and performance together. In this work, we integrate a path selection scheme, called CRoss-layer and Adaptive path selection scheme for Balancing performance and security on WMN data routing (CRAB), in the routing service to improve performance and security of multimedia applications, even in face of attacks. Novel results from scenarios under different data traffic patterns representative from multimedia applications show that the CRAB scheme yields a better tradeoff between network performance and security, even when the network is under routing attacks.