Research Of The Secure Multi-path DSR Protocol In Wireless Mesh Networks

With the increasing need of the user and the rapid development of the wireless network technology, the traditional wireless LAN technology can not be able to meet the requirements of high speed communication in a wide scope. Wireless Mesh networks, as a new wireless network technology, provides higher bandwidth, lower cost and more flexible networking. It can achieve interconnections among a variety of heterogeneous wireless networks, besides it can effectively conquer the disadvantages of the traditional wireless network such as a limited coverage, low scalability and poor robustness etc. So, Wireless Mesh Networks has a very broad researching area and a prospective development.Based on introducing the characteristics of Wireless Mesh Networks routing protocols and the attacks came up with, this paper analyze the mechanism and the security flaws of the DSR protocol, and it has proposed a security Multi-path Routing DSR Protocol, named SM_DSR protocol for short. The basic ideas of designing the SM_DSR protocol includes: (1) Processing authentication of the neighbor nodes during a new node joining the network, ensuring the legal authentication of the communicating nodes; (2) Implementing local irralated multi-path routing discovery with the help of filtering mechanism and end node irrelation calculating methods, generating multiple paths locally irralated arriving at target node; (3) Utilizing digital signature technology based on identity to signate and authenticate the RREQ between two hops, and utilizing the one-way security certificate to authenticate the RREP and the RRER; realizing routing control message security authentication; (4) Combining two-way path trust and real-time link quality assessment, using security probability as a criterion, selecting multi-path in a heuristic way for data transferring. Analysis and simulation results showed that the SM_DSR protocol can defense most of the routing attacks and can provide better load balancing and routing fault tolerance.Meanwhile, this paper implemented the SM_DSR protocol based on Click on the Linux platform, and built a Mesh routing protocol testing platform, on which we tested the performance and analyzed the results. The results showed that the SM_DSR protocol is better than the DSR protocol in the aspects of network throughput, packet reception success rate and stability, which can effectively improve the network performance, and is suitable for wireless Mesh networks that require secure, reliable network quality.