Authentication Method for 802.11S Infrastructure Mode

With the rapid development of the WLAN, the 802.11s mesh network is emerging. However, the security in the 802.11s mesh network is not well defined or specified, and there is no standard method to authenticate a mesh point that is creating a mesh link. In this paper, a solution is proposed for the authentication of mesh points in the infrastructure model. In this proposal, the 802.1X/EAP and neighbor graph is combined to realize fast mutual authentications between a new mesh point and each of its mesh links. Analysis shows that the computation and communication load of our scheme is greatly less than that of the scheme in J. Agre et al. (2005). At the same time, the simulation results indicate that the authentication latency of our scheme is less than that of the scheme in J. Agre et al. (2005).