A Role Based Privacy-Aware Secure Routing Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have drawn much attention for emerging as a promising technology to meet the challenges in next generation networks. Security and privacy protection have been the primary concerns in pushing towards the success of WMNs. There have been a multitude of solutions proposed to ensure the security of the routing protocol and the privacy information in WMNs. However, most of them are based on the assumptions that all nodes cooperate with routing and forwarding packets and the attacks are from outside. In order to defend against the internal attacks and to achieve better security and privacy protection, this paper proposes a role based privacy-aware secure routing protocol (RPASRP), which combines a new dynamic reputation mechanism with the role based multi-level security technology and a hierarchical key management protocol. Simulation results show that RPASRP implements the security and privacy protection against the inside attacks more effectively and efficiently and performs better than the classical hybrid wireless mesh protocol in terms of packet delivery ratio and average route length.