Privacy preservation with RTT-based detection for wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) upraised as superior technology offering all aspects of services as compared to conventional networks. Due to the absence of centralised authority, WMNs suffers from both external and internal attacks, which decrease the overall performance of WMNs. In this study, the authors proposed an efficient handoff authentication protocol with privacy preservation of nonce and transfer ticket against external attacks during handoff and proposed round trip time (RTT)-based detection protocol to resist against internal attacks in WMNs. For privacy preservation of nonce and transfer ticket, encryption of the nonce and transfer ticket during handoff authentication process was considered. For detection, the calculation of RTT and processing time to identify the malicious nodes forming wormhole link were considered. The proposed work prevents the AODV routing protocol against the wormhole attack in WMNs. The simulation of the proposed work was done using NS-3 simulator, and the experimental results show that the performance of the proposed method prevents WMNs from both external and internal attacks.