Experimental Study of Security Architectures for Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper we demonstrate the potential of MobiSEC, a complete security architecture for wireless mesh networks (WMNs), that provides both access control for mesh users and routers as well as a key distribution scheme. MobiSEC has been implemented and integrated in MobiMESH, a WMN implementation that provides a complete framework for testing and analyzing the behavior of a mesh network in real-life environments. Our experimental testbed compares MobiSEC both with a static fixed-key approach and with an end-to-end solution that consists in establishing an encrypted IPSec tunnel. Experimental studies show that MobiSEC considerably increases the WMN security, with a negligible impact on the network performance, thus representing an effective solution for wireless mesh networking.