Performance Evaluation of Different CRL Distribution Schemes Embedded in WMN Authentication

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising technology to provide low cost and scalable solutions for high speed Internet access and additional services. In hybrid WMNs, where mesh clients also act as relaying agents and form a mesh client network, it is important to provide users with an efficient anonymous and accountable authentication scheme. Accountability is required for the malicious users that are to be identified and revoked from the network access and related services. Promising revocation schemes are based on Certification Revocation Lists (CRLs). Since in hybrid WMNs mesh clients also authenticate other clients, distribution of these CRLs is an important task. In this paper, we propose and examine the performance of different distribution schemes of CRLs and analyze authentication performance in two scenarios: in one scenario all mesh routers and mesh clients obtain CRLs and in the second one, CRLs are held only by the mesh routers and mesh clients acting as relaying agents require CRL checking to be performed from the router in authenticating another client.