SeCA: A framework for Secure Channel Assignment in wireless mesh networks

Abstract

To maximize the available throughput in multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks (WMNs), it is a critical issue to design a channel assignment scheme efficiently utilizing orthogonal channels. However, most channel assignment schemes are vulnerable to the misbehaviors of nodes participating in channel assignment, and existing secure channel assignment schemes do not address all of the vulnerabilities. In this paper, we address the threats to channel assignment in WMNs resulting from node misbehaviors and present a generic verification framework to detect such misbehaviors. We develop a concrete verification scheme based on this framework and an existing distributed channel assignment scheme. We validate our approach by implementing the verification scheme and evaluating it through simulation. The results show that our approach improves misbehavior detection with minimum performance overhead.