Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

The proposed project will investigate how to achieve reliable, efficient, and secure end-to-end data delivery services over challenged wireless networks with Internet as backbone. A challenged communication network is a networking environment with very large transmission delays and/or intermittent connectivity, such as in the interworking between cellular networks and Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) and in wireless ad hoc networks. The project will develop (a) a scalable distributed routing scheme to accommodate mobile user roaming between wireless subnets, (b) a service quality provisioning scheme which achieves efficient resource utilization, (c) a radio channel access scheme, taking into account the opportunistic connection over intermittent links, and (d) a secure message delivery mechanism, which protects end entities and core nodes on a disconnected data link from attacks, and blocks access to unsubscribed services from end users.The novelty and significance of this research lie in two aspects: 1) the challenged wireless networking environment is an urgent and brand new domain to explore, and 2) the distributed mechanisms for service quality provisioning and efficient resource utilization are technically much more complex than centralized control techniques developed for cellular networks and/or WLAN separately. The research outcomes will be disseminated through interactions and collaborations with the industry sponsor and through publications in archival journals, premier conference proceedings, and invention disclosures and patents. Development of effective and efficient resource allocation and network control mechanisms is essential to economically provide ubiquitous communication services to mobile users. Invention of successful new techniques on the subject will result in significant benefits to Canadian users and will foster a vital competitive edge to Canadian telecommunications industry in the international market place.