An improved security mechanism for high-throughput multicast routing in wireless mesh networks against Sybil attack

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have become one of the important domains in wireless communications. They comprise of a number of static wireless routers which form an access network for end users to IP-based services. Unlike conventional WLAN deployments, wireless mesh networks offer multihop routing, facilitating an easy and cost-effective deployment. In this paper, an efficient and secure multicast routing on such wireless mesh networks is concentrated. This paper identifies novel attacks against high throughput multicast protocols in wireless mesh networks through S-ODMRP protocol. Recently, Sybil attack is observed to be the most harmful attack in WMNs, where a node illegitimately claims multiple identities. This paper systematically analyzes the threat posed by the Sybil attack to WMN. The Sybil attack is encountered by the defense mechanism called Random Key Predistribution technique (RKP). The performance of the proposed approach which integrates the S-ODMRP and RKP is evaluated using the throughput performance metric. It is observed from the experimental results that the proposed approach provides good security against Sybil attack with very high throughput.