Collaborative Traffic-Aware Intrusion Monitoring in Multi-channel Mesh Networks

Intrusion monitoring is an indispensable security measure for multi-channel wireless mesh networks. This paper studies how to use mesh routers to monitor a network while supporting regular traffic. This paper shows that the traffic aware monitoring (TRAM) problem is an NP-hard problem, which is challenging in coordinating monitoring and traffic forwarding to provide maximal monitoring coverage. This paper proposes three heuristic strategies for seeking optimal monitoring channels and develops a TRAM protocol for accommodating monitoring and transmission simultaneously in mesh networks. The evaluation shows that the proposed TRAM scheme can effectively utilize mesh routers´ idle time for monitoring with only minor impact to regular traffic.