Performance evaluation of PASER — An efficient secure route discovery approach for wireless mesh networks

In emergency and rescue operations, wireless mesh networks are attracting increased attention as a high-performance and low-cost solution for ubiquitous network access. In this paper, we evaluate the novel secure mesh route discovery protocol PASER, which has been designed to address the mesh network security in such critical environments. The protocol aims to set up reliable ad-hoc routes between network nodes and to combat unauthorized nodes of manipulating the route look-up process. Especially, its lightweight symmetric authentication scheme is noteworthy. The protocol is investigated together with the well-established routing protocols AODV, DYMO, BATMAN and OLSR under various scenario conditions and different attacks. In contrast to its counterparts, the results show that PASER is able to secure the network without noticeable computational overhead. On top of that, the paper reveals that PASER outperforms its counterparts in many cases in terms of packet delivery ratio and maximum end-to-end delay.