Grant: Department of National Defence / NSERC Research Partnership

Cognitive radio has received tremendous interest as an emerging new technology that enables dynamic use of radio resources to increase spectrum efficiency. On the other hand, cooperative wireless communication has received tremendous interests as an untapped means for improving performance of information transmission operating over the ever-challenging wireless medium. Cognitive and cooperative communications can offer significant performance enhancements in various wireless networks, including 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 cognitive and cooperative communications in MANETs, several significant research challenges remain to be addressed before widespread deployment of MANETs with cognitive and cooperative 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 cognitive and cooperative 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 RemoteTronic to advance cognitive and cooperative MANET technologies. This project will provide a solid knowledge base to support the efforts of Canadian industry to develop practical andcommercially viable MANETs with cognitive and cooperative 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.