A-WEOR: Communication Privacy Protection for Wireless Mesh Networks Using Encoded Opportunistic Routing

Recent research in the physical and MAC models of IEEE 802.11 has shown that wireless nodes expose traffic patterns at PHY/MAC layers. Adversaries can easily utilize these patterns to derive the end-to- end communication relations using statistical traffic analysis attack. IEEE 802.11 provides MAC layer broadcast capabilities which can be used to protect the flow from such traffic analysis. In this paper, we present a novel approach A-WEOR, utilizing network coding and opportunistic routing to protect the communication patterns for wireless mesh networks. Our evaluation proves that A-WEOR is an efficient solution which achieves exceedingly superior anonymity compared to existing methodologies.