Identity-based Key Management And Secure Routing Protocols Design In Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks are new paradigm of wireless networks with broadly applicable prospects. They are self-organized, self-configured wireless broadband network structures consisting of wireless routers and wireless terminals. Mesh networks called"Next Generation Networks"by network researchers forecast the coming of next stage for wireless revolution. Security is a critical issue for potential application of wireless mesh networks. Howerver, providing security in mesh networks is challenging due to all the characteristics of these networks, such as the vulnerability of the wireless links, the limited physical protection of each node or the dynamically changing topology. Mesh networks are very crisp, and they are more vulnerable compared to traditional networks. It is hard to secure a wireless mesh network with limited network infrastructure.In this dissertation, we investigate a series of security problems in wireless mesh networks, such as key management, identity authentication, secure routing etc. The main contribution is as follows:1. Key management schemes are proposed to establish basic trust relationship of nodes for center-mode and peer-to-peer mode mesh networks respectively. The schemes utilize ID-based cryptography and do not use public key certificates, which decreases the need of computing and storage abilities of clients'terminals, as well as communication cost for system key management.2. According to characteristics of wireless mesh networks, two secure routing protocols are given based on two ad hoc routing protocols (DSDV for unicast and MAODV for multicast). The given secure versions of routing protocols enhance security of the original protocols without losing much performance.