SLAB: A Secure Localized Authentication and Billing Scheme for Wireless Mesh Networks

The future metropolitan-area wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are expected to contain compromise-prone Mesh Access Points (MAPs) with a high frequency of inter-domain roaming/handoff events. This paper introduces a novel secure localized authentication and billing (SLAB) scheme, which aims to address both security guarantee and performance in terms of system compromise resilience capability, inter-domain handoff authentication latency, and workload of the roaming broker (RB). With extensive analysis and simulation, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme can be a practical solution for achieving secure roaming and billing in metropolitan-area WMNs.