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Self-healing, self-configuring and self-organizing characteristics of Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) (Akyildiz & Wang, 2005; Khan & Pathan, 2013) makes it as a key technology of next generation. There exist three kinds of WMN architectures consisting of 2 sorts of nodes; Mesh Clients (MC) and Mesh Routers (MR). Mesh routers act as a backbone that is used to forward the data traffic to the destination node while MCs are the endpoint devices which utilizes the network services. Due to its dynamic and broadcasting nature, WMN has become the focus of research to increase the coverage range with easy deployment nature (Wu et al., 2016; Sbeiti et al., 2016; Kas et al., 2012). Security (Rathee & Saini, 2016; Shams & Rizaner, 2014; Chen et al., 2016; Khan et al., 2012; Rathee & Saini, 2016) in WMN is a challenging issue, since the mesh clients are unstable and intrinsic malicious nodes may cause various perilous attacks (i.e. DoS, Sybil attack) by limiting the network performance metrics (Su, 2011; Tseng et al., 2011; Akilarasu & Shalinie, 2016). Several authentication protocols (Henriquez & Jimenez, 2016; Li et al., 2013; Fan et al., 2013) have been proposed in the literature by considering the characteristics of WMN. Numerous cryptosystem techniques are used to provide the security and can be categorized into two different categories; symmetric and public key based scheme. In symmetric key based (Watanabe et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2006) scheme, a single key is used to provide the security where a third party is involved to prove the public key authenticity between source and destination whereas in public key (Umamaheswari et al., 2015; Bruno et al., 2005) cryptosystem that is also called asymmetric technique, the trust relationship is established without the involvement of third party.
PANA (Ohba et al, 2008), LHAP (Zhu et al., 2006) and AKES (He et al., 2010) are some authentication techniques to provide the security inside the network. PANA is a method that is deployed to authenticate the clients in order to access the network using IP based protocols while LHAP is a one-way hash chain which is used for authenticating the data packets. AKES proposed by the author Aboba is a distributed hierarchical technique based on multi capricious symmetric function. In this, a polynomial based key distribution model is used in which individual equations are distributed by the servers to their clients. The foremost limitation with all these previous approaches is the communication overhead. A significant communication overhead may cause perilous attacks and increase the traffic congestion inside the network. A security technique having significant message transmission between source and destination may cause certain types of intrinsic or extrinsic attacks. Therefore, it is required to define an authentication technique which takes less processing (encryption/decryption) time.
In this manuscript a technique is proposed whose aim is to overcome the communication overhead by reducing the response and evaluation timing of the technique. A technique having fast response and less evaluation time may strengthen the security mechanism inside the network.