A survey on wormhole attacks on Wireless Mesh Networks and its detection

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have come out as an economical and extensible technology that can offer low-cost, high bandwidth, better coverage, etc to meet the needs of lot of people with different properties. But because of its open nature and wireless transmission; it is prone to many attacks of which the wormhole is the severe one. In this attack, the attackers form a tunnel between them; overhear the packets, forward them to each other and packets are replayed at the other end of network. The main objective of this paper is to study the wormhole attack related to WMNs and to study the various detection mechanisms of wormhole. The various wormhole detection schemes like: shared information among communicating access points, cluster-based detection, detection using hop-count, etc are also studied. The effect of these given schemes on wormhole and network is also evaluated. Thus the research study is based on WMNs, wormholes, wormhole detection and its effect. Keywords— Wireless Mesh Networks, Denial of services, Wormhole attack, Authentication Server, Mesh Points, time division duplex, time division multiple access, Pair wise Master Key Security association, Mobile Ad Hoc Network, Wormhole detection based on Neighbor's Neighbor scheme, Random Walk Route Scheme.