SRPM: secure routing protocol for IEEE 802.11 infrastructure based wireless mesh networks

Infrastructure based IEEE 802.11 wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are new paradigm of low cost broadband technology. The large scale city-wide community-based coverage and multi-hop architecture are such characteristics which are vulnerable to network layer threats, and the adversary can exploit them for large scale degradation of the broadband services. So far many secure routing protocols have been proposed for ad-hoc networks, however, due to the different nature and characteristics; they cannot perform well in a WMN environment. In this paper, we discuss the limitations and challenges as well as propose an exclusive secure routing protocol for an infrastructure based wireless mesh (SRPM) network. SRPM is robust against a variety of multi-hop threats and performs well over a range of scenarios we tested.