Trust Based Authentication and Key Establishment for Secure Routing in WMN

In Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN), an authentication technique can be compromised due to the distributed network architecture, the broadcast nature of the wireless medium and dynamic network topology. Several vulnerabilities exist in different protocols for WMNs. Hence, in this paper, we propose trust based authentication and key establishment for secure routing in WMN. Initially, a trust model is designed based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) to exchange the trust information among the nodes. The routing table is utilized to select the destination nodes, for which the link information is updated and the route verification is performed. Based on the trust model, mutual authentication is applied. When a node moves from one operator to another for accessing the router, inter-authentication will be performed. When a node moves within the operator for accessing the router, then intra-authentication will be performed. During authentication, keys are established using identity based cryptography technique. By simulation results, we show that the proposed technique enhances the packet delivery ratio and resilience with reduced drop and overhead.