An Empirical Measurement of Security Association in 802.11 Mesh Networks

Security association established by authentication schemes enables wireless networks resilient from external attacks. However, an enhanced security guarantee will influence network performance more or less. In this paper, we observe the detailed actions of a security association in the procedure of establishment and shift, in a wireless mesh network (WMN), i.e. a typical multi-hop network. To investigate the behaviors of security association in different environment, several experiments are implemented in our testbed with discriminatory parameters sets, such as routing efficiency, topology diversity and subsequent traffic load. The quantified interactions between security association and network performance are exposed by the comparison of representative parameters. Meanwhile, a guideline is suggested for the design of access schemes which take both security and QoS into account.