Analysis of a Key Management Scheme for Wireless Mesh Networks
Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a viable option for many applications. These include home, corporate (including power grid) and automotive monitoring/control, and low cost Internet provisioning. However, security is an important aspect of WMNs, because of applications such as corporate monitoring/control and Internet provisioning. In order to provide security properties such as data confidentiality and integrity, a solid key management scheme (that also satisfies other properties of WMNs such as support for ad hoc networks) is required. This thesis describes the design and implementation of the SMOCK key management scheme, as well as its integration with SMesh, a readily available wireless mesh network software. There are two modes of integration proposed, and experiments were conducted to determine various metrics important to SMOCK. The metrics are parameter generation times, key generation times, round trip times, and encryption times. These experiments determined that the network model (namely the average message size, average hop count of a message, number of nodes in the network, the maximum allowed resilience in the network and the transmit power of the mesh nodes) essentially determines the scenario of integration used with the mesh network.
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