Analysis of Routing and Secure Routing in Hybrid Wireless Mesh Networks

Interoperability is one of the main characteristics of Hybrid Wireless Mesh Networks (HWMNs).In HWMNs, network devices have different resource constrains; identifying optimal paths over the heterogeneous environment is a challenging task.Reactive and proactive routing protocols of Ad-Hoc and sensor networks are ineffective in terms of scalability, thus researchers have come up with new routing protocols like cross-layer, and load-balancing protocols.However, these protocols fail to provide basic security to the network, a very few protocols have addressed the security in HWMNs, each of the secure protocol has its own limitations.In this paper, we analyze the issues in HWMNs routing protocols, and the security issues in proactive, reactive and hybrid protocols with respect to various network layer attacks.Based on our analysis, we have proposed the new research directions in terms of improving HWMNs routing functionality in the heterogeneous environment and new security dimensions for optimizing the network node resources and security mechanisms in HWMNs.