Developing Security Solutions for Wireless Mesh Enterprise Networks

Our study on the deployment topology and communication characteristics of wireless mesh enterprise networks (WMENs) leads to three critical security challenges: (a) deployment of network devices are not planar, rather devices are deployed over three-dimensional space, (b) message generated/received by a mesh client traverses through mesh routers in a multi-hop fashion, and (c) mesh clients being mostly mobile in nature may result in misbehaving or spurious during communications. We address these challenges for WMENs that may be a small network within an office or a medium-size network for all offices in an entire building, or a large scale network among offices in multiple buildings. We develop a matrix key distribution technique that perfectly suits the network topology. A session key establishment protocol is presented to achieve the client-router and router-router communication security. Finally, a misbehaving client detection algorithm is developed based on the communication history. We analyze and evaluate the performance to show the suitability of our proposed security solutions.