Secure Authentication and Key Management Protocols for Mobile Multihop WiMAX Networks

Mobile Multihop Relay (MMR) network is one of the emerging technologies, especially LTE-Advanced, WiMAX and the Smart grid communications. Ensuring security is one of the most imperative and challenging issues in MMR networks. Privacy Key Management (PKM) protocol is proposed to ensure the security measures in MMR networks. However, the protocol still faces several security threats, specifically Denial of Service (DoS), replay attacks, Man in the Middle (MitM) attacks and the interleaving attacks, which is termed as Medium Access Control (MAC) layer attacks. This paper proposed a modified version PKM protocol for both unilateral and mutual authentication, which is termed as Self-organized Efficient Authentication and Key Management Scheme (SEAKS) authentication protocol. This protocol ensures secure end-to-end data transmission using distributed hop-by-hop authentication and localized key management schemes with a very simple and efficient way. The performance evaluation of the proposed schemes in terms of packet delivery ratio, packet overhead, processing time and the effect of increasing number of rogue relay stations is carried out and compared with the official draft of MMR WiMAX and the SEN XU. The result showed that our proposed scheme out-performed the base line protocols.