A new security access scheme for WLANs and its performance simulation analysis

The IEEE 802.11 standard is becoming the most popular and efficient network topology deployed today. Providing and ensuring the security of wireless network is an essential part to its continuous growth. Goals such as confidentiality and trust imply that every data transmitted by each user stays known only to the communication parties. Authorization of users is also a very important aspect of network integrity. There exist mechanisms defined by the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) protocol that enable such functionality; however, recent attacks on such systems showed that these mechanisms can be defined. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to authenticate and authorize 802.11 wireless nodes within a network. This new layer of security relies on a neural network decision engine that restricts network access to mobile nodes whose physical location is within a threshold distance from the wireless access point or the controller of the network. This method gives an extra layer of security and allows policies to be enforced which only allow network access from a certain section of the network. We give a detailed description of the work done as well as a performance simulation analysis of this scheme.