Prioritization-based QoS Support with
Attack Resilience in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Sponsor: DoD Infrastructure Support Program for HBCU/MI
Grant: 54477-CI-ISP (UNCLASSIFIED)
Period: September 15, 2008 - August 31, 2012
Amount: $587,872
PI: Turgay Korkmaz

I am looking for new graduate students (see the announcement)

Summary

Future military missions will extensively use networked devices along with wireless mobile ad hoc and sensor networks, e.g., troops exchanging strategic information, (un)manned vehicles/devices exchanging command-control messages, critical audio/video streaming between soldiers etc. Clearly, such military applications are in nature mission-critical and require various levels of quality-of-service (QoS) and security supports along with robustness and scalability. Providing such supports is essential to the success of future military missions.

Realizing the importance of providing such supports, the research community has been investigating various QoS and security issues while calling for simpler but yet the-state-of-the-art mechanisms for providing the desired levels of QoS and security. Moreover, most studies are done within idealized simulation environments; thus, it is not clear what will really work in practice. With these in mind, we are mainly targeting the general area of providing QoS support in wireless networks and planning to make our research as experimental as possible by implementing and testing our ideas or other promising ideas using the wireless laptops and sensors that� will be purchased through this� grant. Experimentations will deepen our understanding of the theoretical and practical limitations of wireless networks and allow us to develop practical QoS mechanisms. Taking the concerns due to dynamics of wireless networks into account, we propose a reservationless, prioritization-based QoS support scheme and plan to develop necessary mechanisms across the network and data link (MAC) layers.

Specifically, we plan to explore our recently proposed distributed prioritization scheduling mechanism at the MAC layer along with� new mechanisms at the network layer such as� determining and maintaining QoS-based paths without requiring global state-information. In addition, we plan to extend our proposed mechanisms to multi-radio, multi-channel wireless networks to further increase the capacity.

While providing the envisioned reservationless, prioritization-based QoS support, it is important to consider unauthorized nodes that may not respect the underlying QoS mechanisms and degrade the QoS capabilities through various attacks (e.g., DoS, unauthorized access to the network, delete messages, inject false packets, or impersonate a node). Accordingly, our second important task in this project is to develop necessary security mechanisms and integrate them into our QoS mechanisms so that various attacks/intrusions can be detected and avoided while maintaining the QoS-based operation of the network.

In addition to research, this project targets to quantitatively and qualitatively improve the participation of minority students in computer science while enriching the process of learning and discovery for all students. Although our university is a Hispanic-dominated minority-serving institution, the participation of these students in graduate level education is very low. I believe the experimentation component of our research and the fellowships that will be offered through this grant will attract many of these students and allow us to involve all interested students in our research through various educational activities such as independent studies, weekly seminars, outreach efforts, and mentoring.

Publications

Poster Presentations

Students Supported by This grant

This page certified up-to-date on Jan 12, 2012 by Turgay Korkmaz.