Research And Design Of MSA Based WLAN Mesh Network Security Protocols

Because of Wireless LAN's simple configuration, low prices and increasing rate, it has gradually become the focus of wireless communications field. In recent years, Mesh network is emerging as a new network model. With its unique high coverage of wide bandwidth and the robustness, more and more attentions have been paid to it.When the two technologies combine together, the formation of a wireless LAN Mesh Network (WLAN Mesh Network, WMN) has come up. Due to its WLAN and with the Mesh characteristics, this new network has become the next digital broadband wireless access, one of the directions of the trend. However, this technology has not been widely applied into commercial production. There are many reasons, foremost among which is security, which is not been guaranteed to be good. Because WMN represent a new network concept, it requires specialized security solutions. IEEE 802.11s Working Group is the standardization of WMN, they have already or will be launched some of the criteria in the draft, a new agreement: Mesh Network Security Association Agreement (Mesh Security Association, the MSA). By using this agreement, Mesh nodes can mutually authenticate each other and establish a secure communications link to guarantee the safety of WMN.In this paper, we present the basic concepts of Wireless Mesh Network, especially for WLAN. And we analyze the security problems in WLAN Mesh Network. After details of the MSA protocol, we put forward a typical innovative security solution for wireless LAN, based on MSA, including role distribution for Mesh nodes in the network, certification of Mesh points, network expansion and other issues. By addressing specific security issues in WMN, we give out the security enhancement by applying the new security solution with MSA. In final chapter of this paper, the authors propose the security framework of a specific programme of the design, including experimental environment, system components, processes and module design, analysis and proved the feasibility of this framework.