Research On Authentication Protocol In WLAN Mesh Network

WMN(WLAN Mesh Networks) is a multi-hop, self-organizing and self-healingwireless network with advantages of WLAN and Ad hoc, in favor of multi-point tomulti-point reticular structure, and it is a distributed network with large capacity,highspeed and wide coverage. But the problem of security has become a main concern in theway of WLAN Mesh’s wide commercial application, and it is necessary to find out asuitable security scheme to cater to the characteristics of WMN.At first, the structure, the characteristics and application environment of WMN areintroduced, and the security threat and security needs of WMN are analyzed. Second, byanalyzing the security authentication protocol in Wireless LAN and the security accessscheme in IEEE802.11s, we design a high efficient identity authentication protocolbased on WAI protocol to resolve the problem which the key needs to be transmitted inthe authentication process of IEEE802.11i and IEEE802.11s, improving the efficiencyof WAI protocol and applying to the multi-hop environment of WMN, then analyze theinformation interaction and the performance of security of the protocol. At last, wedesign an authentication protocol based on identity signature in which public keys arenot needed in the process of identity authentication between networks nodes,eliminating extra time cost because of that authentication nodes depend on PKI and CA,and in the protocol the performance of security of the protocol is analyzed in detail.