Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The advance in wireless communication technologies, coupled with the recent proliferation of portable communication devices, e.g., sensors, PDA, cell phone, and laptop, etc., has led to the emergence of mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). MANET is a group of autonomous mobile nodes (usually battery-powered, thus energy limited) that are connected via open and error-prone wireless communication channel without central control or fixed infrastructure. Nodes have limited computation and communication capabilities. Network is dynamic, since nodes are free to join or leave it. Limited bandwidth and communication range cause MANET to rely on multihop message relay. Due to its spontaneous and infrastructure-less nature, MANET has great potentials in a broad range of applications. It is particularly suitable for conference room, emergency rescue, and battlefield scenarios, where communication infrastructure does not exist or is destroyed. The purpose of this research is to address some important QoS and network security issues in MANET. QoS issues include QoS routing and QoS transmission control; security issues include key management, trust management, and intrusion detection. We will integrate our proposed solutions to obtain a secure QoS communication framework, and validate this framework via real-world platform.