Secure Wireless Network with Movable Base Stations

SUMMARY Security, flexibility, and scalability are critical to the success of wireless communications. Wireless networks with movable base stations combine the advantages of mobile ad hoc networks and wireless LANto achieve these goals. Hierarchical mobile wireless network (HMWN) is proposed for supporting movable base stations. In such a system, mobile hosts are organized into hierarchical groups. The group agents serve as a distributed trust entity. A secure packet forwarding algorithm and an authentication and key exchange protocol are developed to protect the network infrastructure. A roaming support mechanism and the associated mutual authentication protocol are proposed to secure the foreign group and the mobile host when it roams within the network. The computation overhead of secure packet forwarding and roaming support algorithms is studied via experiments. The results demonstrate that these two security mechanisms only require, respectively, less than 2% and 0.2% to 5% CPU time in a low-end 700 MHz PC.