Mutual Authentication in Wireless Mesh Networks

A wireless mesh network (WMN) is a new wireless network technology and there is a trend to adopt the technology to build commercial mobile ad hoc networks. Since a WMN is such a network without fixed infrastructure and is operated in an open medium, any user within the range covered by radio wave may access the network. Therefore, a critical requirement for the security in WMN is the authentication of a new user who is trying to join the network. In this paper, we present a new authentication scheme based on a combination of techniques, such as zone-based hierarchical topology structure, virtual certification authority (CA), off-line CA, identity-based cryptosystem and multi-signature. We show that our scheme would improve authentication in security, computational overhead, traffic, authentication latency and storage space.