Secure and Efficient Data Transmission for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless data dissemination can be utilized for broadcasting emergency services and military communication. However secure and reliable dissemination of data over a lossy wireless network is challenging due to security attacks and network dynamics. The current proposed schemes require high computational capability of the devices which may not be feasible in most of hand held receivers. Furthermore, in many scenarios, data may need to be relayed via multiple links before reaching to the end users posing potential data breach. Our proposed scheme alleviates computational requirements along with transmission overhead by exploiting the new transmission technique, namely network coding. Our propose scheme utilizes a hierarchical key structure for efficient security key management. In addition, we utilize the null space of network coding to enable secure relay of data via multiple hops. Also, by exploiting network coding, our scheme don' require cooperation among the relay nodes which significantly reduce the communication overhead. Our analysis results show that under some condition, our propose scheme can save up to 50% transmission bandwidth compared with the traditional approach where users share a common group key. We also show that our proposed scheme can achieve high security under relay attacks. The proposed scheme is also efficient with light computation that would be feasible for mobile devices.