Abstract: Hybrid wireless mesh network (HWMN) is the most practical architecture in wireless mesh networks (WMNs), which provides a fusion of heterogeneous wireless networks, network connectivity and coverage to distributed users in a wide area to support applications in different domains, such as military, finance and healthcare. Due to the multi-hop and decentralized network architecture, HWMN is susceptible to various security threats, especially to the internal attacks aiming to the routing and privacy security. However, existing routing protocols for HWMN cannot ensure the security and protect the user privacy effectively as they are vulnerable to internal attacks. Moreover, few of them have taken the energy consumption into account at routing. To solve the above problem, combining with the characters of the HWMN, this paper proposes a dynamic reputation mechanism based privacy aware secure routing protocol (RPASRP), which combines a new dynamic reputation mechanism with the hierarchical key management protocol and hierarchical encryption scheme. Furthermore, the energy consumption is taken into account in the process of routing. Simulation results show that RPASRP can implement the security and privacy protection against the inside attacks more effectively and decrease the energy consumption in the process of routing.

Key words: hybrid wireless mesh network (HWMN), secure routing protocol, privacy preserving, reputation mechanism, energy consumption