Common key multi-hop packet authentication protocol for wireless mesh networks

To achieve security with efficiency in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is an important issue due to its distributed nature and absence of centralised authority. Due to the absence of central authority, the authentication becomes a challenging task in WMNs. Several attacks could be easily launched in WMNs such as replay attack and impersonation attack. These types of attacks could be launched by an intruders by injecting malicious packets throughout the network among mesh entities. Therefore to overcome from such attacks, we had proposed an efficient multi-hop packet authentication protocol known as 'efficient packet authentication through Diffie-Hellman approach (EPADH)'. Through experimental results, our proposed protocol ensures packet authentication which resists the mentioned attacks and offers efficiency in terms of latency, throughput, packet delivery ratio, and memory utilisation.