Grant: Engage Grants Program

This project is a brand new collaboration between the principal investigator at UOIT and Solana Networks, Ottawa, Canada. The main goal of the proposed project is to design a innovative tool for network situational awareness system to visualize the common operating picture (COP) of trust-based tactical mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET). Network situational awareness systems are used for providing a real-time view of the current status of all network assets for a command and control centre. This task is particularly difficult in tactical MANETs because of harsh environment, dynamic topology due to node mobility,and limited bandwidth. The objective of this project is to design a visualization tool that would include node location discovery without using GPS data, ability to detect and display the trust status of each node, as well as support for common mobile ad-hoc routing protocols such as OLSR and AODV. The specific objectives of the project include: evaluation of the current methods for ad-hoc network topology and location discovery, and proposing the most suitable methods for visualization of trust-based tactical mobile ad-hoc network environments; identifying and proposing potential research issues to enhance the current methods to satisfy the requirements mentioned in the proposal, proposing a high level design for the visualization tool - assuming a specific network environment such as an OLSR routed network, and creating a simulation environment for performance evaluation of the data collection, visualization and routing algorithms in this scenario - utilizing a standard simulator.