A Secure and Reliable Interference-Aware Wireless Mesh Network Design
Abstract
A wireless mesh network (WMN) is a multihop wireless network consisting of a large number of wireless nodes of which some are called gateway nodes and connected with a wired network. Wireless mesh network have attracted much research attention recently due to its flexibility, low-cost and robustness, which facilitate its usability in many potential applications, including last-mile broadband Internet access, neighborhood gaming, Video-on-Demand (VoD), distributed file backup, video surveillance, etc. The broadcast nature, the lack of infrastructure as well as the flexible deployment nature of wireless mesh networks make it different from wired networks, therefore more attention in designing the wireless mesh network is needed to maintain a good performance of this promising technology. We, in this study, investigate the wireless mesh network design taking into consideration three design factors seeking an improvement in the network performance by reducing the interference influence in the network, improving the network reliability to satisfy more requests, and securing the network against malicious eavesdropping attacks. Our design is presented into three sub-problems; sub-problem (1), which seeks an interference-aware robust topology control scheme, sub-problem (2) which seeks a multipath routing scheme, and sub-problem (3) which seeks a secure key management scheme. Through simulations and comparisons with previous work, we show that our proposed solutions outperform previous schemes in providing a better network performance in terms of reducing the network interference, satisfying more number of requests and increasing the network resistance to malicious eavesdropping attacks.