DOI: 10.4018/IJISP.2018040102 International Journal of Information Security and Privacy Volume 12 • Issue 2 • April-June 2018 Copyright © 2018, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. 26 Efcient Authentication Scheme with Reduced Response Time and Communication Overhead in WMN Geetanjali Rathee, Jaypee University of Information Technology, India Hemraj Saini, Jaypee University of Information Technology, India ABSTRACT Recently, Wireless Mesh Network is deliberated as a significant technology due to its self-healing, self-configuring and self-organizing features. The Multi-hop nature of WMN nodes has the potential to forward the data traffic to their intended destination node without the involvement of source node. One of the factors that impact the WMN performance is secure communication process. Various secure authentication mechanisms have been projected however, authentication delay and communication overheads are listed as the main security issues of these approaches. In this article, an efficient and fast authentication protocol have been proposed to reduce the response time, computation overhead during encryption/decryption process of the routing messages. Further various simulations with erratic nodes have been conducted to endorse the enhancement of proposed solution against existing protocols. Moreover, performance comparison between existing and proposed schemes have been analyzed in detail showing that proposed approach has achieved better outcome against convinced consequences. KEyWORdS Authentication Delay, Computational Overhead, NTRU, Response Time, Security, Wireless Mesh Network