A Study Of Reputation Based Secure Routing Protocol For Wireless Mesh Network

As an emerging wireless networking technology, wireless mesh networks (WMNs)have the advantages of dynamic self-configuration and self-healing, high-bandwidth andlow-cost. WMNs have been widely regarded as an indispensable component ofnext-generation wireless networks to facilitate flexible and ubiquitous network accessfrom anywhere at any time, and have extensive potential application fields. Althoughpossessing significant advantages, WMNs also face many security challenges. Amongthem, the design of secure routing protocol is one of the most notable security issues. Anumber of research results on the secure routing protocol have been proposed, however,most of them are the extensions and modifications of the protocols originally designedfor mobile ad hoc networks and thus they can’t really reflect the characteristics ofWMNs. Moreover, most routing protocols in WMNs were designed without securityproblems in mind, especially the internal attacks and user privacy security, where thenodes are all assumed to be honest. Therefore, it is particularly important to design aprivacy protection and internal attack defense based secure routing protocol for WMNs.This dissertation mainly concerns with the design and implementation of the privacyprotection and internal attack defense based secure routing protocol for WMNs. Itsmajor contributions are outlined as follows:1. The routing security and privacy issues in WMNs have been studied. Moreover, theinfluences of internal attacks on the routing security, privacy and the reputationmechanism to solve the internal attacks have been analyzed. Furthermore, wedemonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of using the reputation mechanism toimplement routing security and privacy protection in WMNs.2. The shortages of the existing Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) in securityhave been explored and a static reputation mechanism based secure routing protocol,PA-SHWMP, has been proposed. Firstly, the subject logic is introduced into the processof the reputation computation, and a static reputation mechanism based on subject logicis proposed to identify the malicious nodes. Moreover, the static reputation mechanismassigns the corresponding weight factor to each of the opinions from recommenders toget more accurate and reliable recommendation information. Secondly, the staticreputation mechanism and the multilevel security technology are combined into HWMP,and then the secure routing protocol PA-SHWMP is proposed to effectively identify theinternal malicious nodes, defend against the internal attacks and protect user privacysecurity. 3. The shortages of the PA-SHWMP have been studied, and according to thecharacteristics of the hybrid WMNs, a role and dynamic reputation mechanism basedsecure routing protocol, RPASRP, has been proposed. In RPASRP, firstly, a noveldynamic reputation mechanism and a malicious node classification and managementmechanism are proposed to enhance the effectiveness, accuracy and flexibility of themalicious nodes identification and management. Secondly, a new role and privacyaware based multi-level security mechanism and hierarchical key management protocolare proposed, which improves the routing protection in the process of transmission.Thirdly, the energy consumption is taken into account in the process of routing throughthe presented energy consumption analysis model. Simulation results demonstrate thatRPASRP can defend against the internal attacks, achieve stronger privacy protection andreduce the energy consumption for hybrid WMNs.4. The internal multi-layer threat, bad mouthing attack and the recommendationnodes reliability have been studied and a cross-layer dynamic reputation mechanismbased secure routing protocol RPCSR has been proposed. Firstly, a recommendationnodes reliability evaluation model is proposed to enhance the recommendationinformation credibility and defends against the bad mouthing attack. Secondly, areliable recommendation based cross-layer dynamic reputation mechanism is proposedthrough introducing the cross-layer design theory, which defends against the internalmulti-layer attacks and improves the fault-tolerant ability and the survival ability ofWMNs. Thirdly, based on the cross-layer dynamic reputation mechanism and theaforementioned multi-level security mechanism and hierarchical key managementprotocol, RPCSR can be used to implement and strengthen the user privacy protection.