Grant: Department of National Defence / NSERC Research Partnership

Recently, cooperative wireless communication has received tremendous interest as an untapped means for improving performance of information transmission operating over the ever-challenging wireless medium. By exploiting the broadcast nature of the wireless channel, cooperative communication allows single-antenna radios to share their antennas to form a virtual antenna array, and offers significant performance enhancements in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), which are gaining importance with the increasing number of potential applications, such as military battlefield communications, disaster relief, autonomous vehicular communications, consumer entertainment, and emergency medicine. Despite the potential vision of cooperative wireless communications in MANETs, several significant research challenges remain to be addressed before widespread deployment of MANETs with cooperative wireless communications become practical, including security methods, cross-layer designs, and resource management schemes. The overall goal of this project is to address these above research challenges by developing, evaluating, and demonstrating novel solutions that will make cooperative wireless communications in MANETs more secure, reliable, and effective; and thereby make their widespread deployment practical and commercially viable. These technologies will be developed through interdisciplinary collaborations between academia, industry, and government research laboratories. Researchers from Carleton University and Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) will work closely with industry partner EION to advance cooperative MANET technologies. For proof-of-concept and technology transfer, a MANET testbed will be developed to evaluate the novel algorithms resulting from the research. This project will provide a solid knowledge base to support the efforts of Canadian industry to develop practical and commercially viable MANETs with cooperative wireless communications. A large number of highly qualified personnel will be trained at the postgraduate and undergraduate levels to serve the needs of the growing information technology, wireless communications, and security industry in Canada.