Survey on the Authentication and Key Management of 802.11s

Wireless Mesh Network expanded the capability of the conventional wireless networking by allowing the nodes to operate in proactive mode, reactive mode or the combination of both, the hybrid mode in the multi-hopping nature. By doing so, the links between the nodes become much more robust and reliable because of the number of paths to reach a destination node from a source node can be more than 1 and do not need to rely on the access point (AP) alone to relay the messages. As there may be many possible ways to form an end-to-end link between 2 nodes, the routing security becomes another main concern of the 802.11s protocol. Besides its reliance on the 802.11i for the security measures, 802.11s also includes some new features such as the Mesh Temporal Key (MTK) and the Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE). The authentication and key management (AKM) process of 802.11s were observed in this paper.