A model for malicious code propagation in wireless mesh networks based on cloud security defense

The popularity of wireless communication networks makes them an attractive target to the creators of worms and other malicious code. Indeed, recently a number of worms designed specifically to spread via these wireless networks have emerged. Based on the epidemic theory, this paper proposes a general model which predicts how a worm propagates through a wireless ad hoc network. Then the differential equations of the model is presented and a necessary condition for worms to spread in these networks is derived, which may be useful in designing a secure wireless ad hoc network. Simulation results show that the process of worm propagation in these wireless networks is sensitive to the deployment density of nodes and the energy consumption of nodes. Therefore, our study can provide insight into deriving a general model to characterize worm propagation in wireless ad hoc networks.

Intrusion Detection Systems(IDSs) are widely used to detect both known attacks and unknown attacks performed by internal and external attackers in wireless networks. However, challenging issues for developing IDSs in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are 1) supporting interoperability and 2) handling volatile parameters. In addition, security standards for WMN are still in draft stage, and to protect the WMN, IDSs of similar wireless networks such as wireless sensor, Ad-Hoc, MANET can be adopted, but the best performance is not guaranteed. In this paper, we have classified the existing IDSs for wireless networks into four categories namely single layer IDS, cross-layer IDS, reputation-based IDS, reputation based cross-layer IDS, and analyzed the performance of these IDSs with core-layer attacks and detection methodology. Based on our analysis, we address the loopholes in existing IDSs and specify research directions for strengthening the existing IDSs and for developing new efficient IDSs with respect to backbone mesh and client mesh networks.

Nowadays there are inexpensive WiFi devices that have fostered the deployment of wireless communities. Well known routing protocols used in the Internet do not fit well to time varying characteristic of wireless networks. This has motivated an intensive research on routing protocols for wireless mesh networks. At this time there are a number of mature and stable implementations that are being deployed in production networks. In this paper we focus on the experimental evaluation of a production Wireless Mesh network being deployed in a testbed at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) and a quarter of the city of Barcelona, Spain. To our best knowledge, this is the first paper where a production community wireless network using 802.11an is analyzed.

The wireless mesh network is a new emerging technology that will change the world of industrial networks connectivity to more efficient and profitable. Mesh networks consist of static wireless nodes and mobile customer; have emerged as a key technology fornew generation networks. The Quality of Service (QOS) is designed to promote and support multimedia applications (audio and video), real time. However guarantee of QoS on wireless networks is a difficult problem by comparison at its deployment in a wired IP network. In this paper, we present an efficient routing protocol named as “QoS- Cluster Based Routing Protocol” (Q-CBRP) to support QoS in Wireless Mesh Network.

Resource allocation and admission control algorithm based on non-cooperation game in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh network is a network implemented over a wireless local area network (LAN), and its infrastructure type is decentralized, relatively inexpensive, reliable, and resilient since the wireless routers are often static and not powered by batteries. In addition, the access points (routers) seldom change their positions in wireless mesh networks, and some wireless nodes have gateway functions to provide the connectivity to the Internet. Therefore, such networks behave almost like wired networks with infrequent topology changes and limited node failures. Due to these good properties and potential applications such as providing commercial Internet access to residents and local businesses, wireless mesh networks have drawn a lot of attention in recent years. For example, wireless mesh networks are being used as the last mile for extending the Internet connectivity for mobile nodes. In addition, some commercial deployments of multihop wireless meshes are already in the works. For instance, a number of mesh networks have been deployed in some cities of the United States, including Medford, Oregon, and cities in Minnesota [4]. Unlike traditional wired network, close-by mesh routers share certain wireless channels and the capacity of wireless mesh network will be increased tremendously when extending from a single channel model to a multiradio, multichannel, multihop model. For example, if two nodes vi and v j could communicate with each other by channel f1, and both nodes have at least one more available network interface cards, which could operate on another channel f2, if f2 is also available for both nodes, vi and v j could use both f1 and f2 to communicate simultaneously. When such cases are applied to more wireless nodes, the throughput of a wireless network will be increased tremendously.

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) integrate the advantages of WLANs and mobile Ad Hoc networks, which have become the key techniques of next-generation wireless networks in the context of emergency recovery. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are multi-hop wireless networks with instant deployment, self-healing, self-organization and self-configuration features. These capabilities make WMNs a promising technology for incident and emergency communication. An incident area network (IAN) needs a reliable and lively routing path during disaster recovery and emergency response operations when infrastructure-based communications and power resources have been destroyed and no routes are available. Power aware routing plays a significant role in WMNs, in order to provide continuous efficient emergency services. The existing power aware routing algorithms used in wireless networks cannot fully fit the characteristics of WMNs, to be used for emergency recovery. This paper proposes a power aware routing algorithm (PARA) for WMNs, which selects optimal paths to send packets, mainly based on the power level of next node along the path. This algorithm was implemented and tested in a proven simulator. The analytic results show that the proposed power node-type aware routing algorithm metric can clearly improve the network performance by reducing the network overheads and maintaining a high delivery ratio with low latency.

The paradigm of wireless mesh networks has matured in the last decade after extensive research and development. As opposed to the time of their inception, current mesh networks are expected to deliver carrier-grade access services to their users. With the increasing expectations, it is generally recognized that there is a lack of understanding of the level of service continuity that mesh networks can provide to its users. In this research, we address a set of network design problems and propose solutions to improve the service continuity of wireless mesh networks. First, we investigate power control as a network layer problem in mesh networks. It is commonly acknowledged that reducing transmit power levels of nodes to the minimum required to retain connectivity always increases network capacity. In this work, we show that increasing power level of nodes can be beneficial in many cases depending on network’s traffic and topological characteristics. With extensive analysis and simulations, we characterize achievable spatial reuse and capacity with respect to power control in various practical scenarios. Second, we address the problem of generation of traffic hot-spots in wireless networks, and propose a novel power control scheme for load balancing. Using a heuristic based on the concept of centrality, we show that if we increase the power levels of only the nodes which are expected to relay more packets, significant relay load balancing can be achieved even using shortest path routing. Different from divergent routing schemes, such load balancing strategy is applicable to any arbitrary topology and traffic pattern. With this understanding of power control and load balancing, we investigate the service continuity issues of an urban-scale mesh networks. We define and study two essential service continuity metrics - connection robustness (K-center availability) and performance robustness (K-center performability). K-center availability is the fraction of the time a mesh network is available to its users, while performability is a composite measure of performance (here - throughput) and robustness that captures aggregate experience of mesh users over a long period of time. We develop efficient algorithms for estimating these quantities for large urban-scale meshes and study their characteristics in various existing mesh networks. Our study reveals numerous novel insights that can help in designing mesh networks with high availability and performability. While evaluating the performability, we used ideal case throughput performance estimation that ensures fair network resource allocation among the flows. Although this allows faster computation which is especially necessary for large state space exploration, it is difficult to implement in real-world using CSMA/CA MAC. To address this, we target the issue of unfair and lower utilization of network resources in wireless networks. Specifically, in a mesh network, nodes closer to gateways often achieve a larger share of bandwidth resources while nodes farther away often starve for useful bandwidth. Using back-pressure utility maximization framework, we provide a solution to the issue of spatial bias that can be implemented using current 802.11 standards. To further increase the efficiency of back-pressure policy in mesh networks, we propose a dynamic packet aggregation scheme that is especially effective in Internet-like packet size distribution. Along the same lines, we use the back-pressure invariants to develop a variable channel width assignment scheme that can yield maximum benefits of using varying-sized channels while remaining fair in network-wide resource allocation.

The wireless mesh network is a new emerging technology that will change the world of industrial networks connectivity to more efficient and profitable. Mesh networks consist of static wireless nodes and mobile customer; have emerged as a key technology for new generation networks. The Quality of Service (QOS) is designed to promote and support multimedia applications (audio and video), real time. However guarantee of QoS on wireless networks is a difficult problem by comparison at its deployment in a wired IP network. In this paper, we present an efficient routing protocol named as “QoS-Cluster Based Routing Protocol” (Q-CBRP) to support QoS in Wireless Mesh Network.

IEEE 802.11 based wireless mesh networks can exhibit severe fairness problem by distributing throughput among different flows originated from different nodes. Congestion control, Throughput, Fairness are the important factors to be considered in any wireless network. Flows originating from nodes that directly communicate with the gateway get higher throughput. On the other hand, flows originating from two or more hops away get very little throughput. For this reason a distributed fair scheduling is an ideal candidate for fair utilization of gateway’s resources (i.e., bandwidth, airtime) and thereby achieving fairness among contending flows in WMNs. There are numerous solution for aforementioned factors in wireless mesh network. We figured out some problems of few existing solutions and integrated to give the solution for those problems. We considered neighborhood phenomenon, airtime allocation and elastic rate control to design a novel technique to achieve fair rate control in wireless mesh network. And finally we introduce distributed fair scheduling to get fairness in mesh network.

Multi-hop Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is a promising new technique for communication with routing protocol designs being critical to the effective and efficient of these WMNs. A common approach for routing traffic in these networks is to select a minimal distance from the source to destination as in wireless networks. Opportunistic Routing (OR) makes use of the broadcasting ability of wireless network and is especially very helpful for WMN because all nodes are static. Our proposed scheme of Multicast Opportunistic Routing (MOR) in WMNs is based on the broadcast transmissions and Learning Automata (LA) to expand the potential candidate nodes that can aid in the process of retransmission of the data. The receivers are required to be in sync with one another in order to avoid duplicated broadcasting of data which is generally achieved by formulating the forwarding candidates according to some LA based metric. The most helpful aspect of this protocol is that it intelligently learns from the past experience and improves its performance. The results obtained via this approach of MOR show that the proposed scheme outperforms some existing schemes and is an improved and more effective version of opportunistic routing in a mesh network.

Chapter 11 - Wireless Network Security

The wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have become one of the popular technologies of the wireless network utilization. WMN provides reliable and scalable wireless network because of its features such as dynamic self-organizing, self-configuring, Self-managing and self-healing. Routing protocols play an essential role in finding and establishing an active route from a source to a destination in WMNs. This article focuses on the performance evaluation and comparison of some routing protocols commonly used in WMNs for VoIP application: AODV, DSR, OLSR and TORA has been investigated over client Wireless Mesh Networks based on OPNET simulation in a different network sizes and mobility. This article presents a background of some designs and solutions based on an elaborated simulation investigation. The performance comparisons are carried out with regard to the node variation in network sizing and mobility. Based on the empirical outputs, the authors suggested that to utilize a specific routing protocol in certain situations.

There is a growing interest in ad hoc wireless networking internationally, due to the great cost in infrastructure and the time delay for deployment for new traditional wireless networks for a specific purpose (i.e. cellular systems). The interest arises from the possibility of delivering telecommunication services rapidly and with the reduced needs for costly generic infrastructure. Examples of such services include, among others, a convention where a large number of people are concentrated in a limited geographical area, a university campus with a great density of telecommunication users, or even a disaster area where the fixed infrastructure have been damaged. In most examples, ad hoc wireless networks may complement or replace the existing wireless telecommunications infrastructure. One flavor of ad hoc wireless networks that is of interest in this context, and is well adapted to the Lebanese market, are wireless mesh networks (WMN). We propose that the proliferation of WiFi hotspots in high-density areas of population in Lebanon forms the basis of deployment of mesh routers for a WMN. Of specific interest is to be able to use the dense infrastructure of GSM-EDGE (and in the future HSUPA) cellular networks in Lebanon to interconnect those routers in specific locations where it will be hard to deploy additional fixed and cumbersome cellular infrastructure. Locations where hotspots are already deployed (commercial centers, university campuses, business areas, etc.) or could be deployed for special events (conventions, concerts, etc.) could thus be interconnected in a hybrid wireless network, resulting in significantly increased capacity of the network for local voice and data traffic at little additional infrastructure cost. Furthermore, this could a preliminary step for direct connection between the mesh routers and not via the cellular network, into what will become a full- fledged WMN. The structure of the paper is as follows: section the author gives an introduction on ad hoc wireless networks; section II describes WMN and define the design issues of WMN; in section III, we look at a proposed scenario for deployment of WMNs in the Lebanese market and the issues of interconnection with the GSM networks. We will conclude in section IV.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a new paradigm that highly increase the network management flexibility through simple but powerful abstractions. The key idea is decoupling the control plane, which makes the forward decisions, from the data plane, which effectively makes the forward. However, the OpenFlow, the main SDN enabler, is designed mainly by wired networks characteristics. As consequence, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is not suitable for operating as control plane and many wireless networks features are neglected in the OpenFlow, e.g.: power control and network ID. In addition, there are few effort research to extend SDN to wireless networks and these existing works focus on very specific issues of this integration. In this paper, we propose an architecture to extent the OpenFlow functionalities in order to proper deal with wireless networks, including an approach for transporting the control plane over wireless multihop networks. The extensions include new rules, actions, and commands, which bring the network management flexibility to the wireless context. We validated our proposal by implementing and testing some extensions in a small real world testbed. As a proof of concept, we illustrate the OpenFlow capability of isolation between research and production traffics in a wireless backhaul.