Anonymous User Communication for Privacy Protection in Wireless Metropolitan Mesh Networks

As a combination of ad hoc networks and wireless local area network (WLAN), the wireless mesh network (WMN) provides a low-cost convenient solution to the last-mile network-connectivity problem. As such, existing route protocols designed to provide security and privacy protection for ad hoc networks are no longer applicable in WMNs. On the other hand, little research has focused on privacy-preserving routing for WMNs. In this paper, we propose two solutions for security and privacy protection in WMNs. The first scheme relies on group signatures, together with user credentials, to deliver security and privacy protection. By enforcing access control using user credentials, the user's identity has to be disclosed to mesh routers. To avoid this, our second scheme employs pairwise secrets between any two users to achieve stronger privacy protection. In the second scheme, the user is kept anonymous to mesh routers. Finally, we analyze these two schemes in terms of security, privacy, and performance.