PASER: Secure and Efficient Routing Approach for Airborne Mesh Networks

Low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) combined with WLAN mesh networks (WMNs) have facilitated the emergence of airborne network-assisted applications. In disaster relief, they are key solutions for 1) on-demand ubiquitous network access and 2) efficient exploration of sized areas. Nevertheless, these solutions still face major security challenges as WMNs are prone to routing attacks. Consequently, the network can be sabotaged, and the attacker might manipulate payload data or even hijack the UAVs. Contemporary security standards, such as the IEEE 802.11i and the security mechanisms of the IEEE 802.11s mesh standard, are vulnerable to routing attacks as we experimentally showed in previous works. Therefore, a secure routing protocol is indispensable for making feasible the deployment of UAV-WMN. As far as we know, none of the existing research approaches have gained acceptance in practice due to their high overhead or strong assumptions. Here, we present the position-aware, secure, and efficient mesh routing approach (PASER). Our proposal prevents more attacks than the IEEE 802.11s/i security mechanisms and the well-known, secure routing protocol ARAN, without making restrictive assumptions. In realistic UAV-WMN scenarios, PASER achieves similar performance results as the well-established, nonsecure routing protocol HWMP combined with the IEEE 802.11s security mechanisms.