Wireless Mesh Network Security: An Overview

Wireless mesh networks, also known as ad hoc, peer-to-peer networks have become a major research area in recent years as the need to produce large scale wireless networks has grown. So-called ‘killer applications’ such as wireless sensor networks and wireless voice over internet protocol have pushed the technology towards an ever widening range of deployments. This coupled with an increasing amount of interest from both the private and government sectors to find and utilize technology that allows the completion of last and first mile broadband initiatives has led to a growing amount of interest within the subject by more than those of an academic background. But, like most new innovations the security of these nodes and the information that they transmit was not considered from the beginning development stages. Backwards compatibility with existing wireless technologies has forced a reliance on existing security measures in some major components. As a result major flaws have been found within the security infrastructure of these wireless mesh networks. This paper seeks to provide an analysis of the security challenges facing the development and deployment of wireless mesh networks utilizing an ad-hoc multi-hop topology by examining the network structure, possible attacks and the defenses to those attacks by using currently available research and technology.