ITR/SI: On Robust and Secure Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

University Of Cincinnati Main Campus, Cincinnati OH

Investigators

Abstract

A Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is a collection of mobile autonomous system of nodes connected by wireless links with multi-hop communication and no underlying infrastructure. Research in the field of MANET is receiving unprecedented attention due to their profound impact on human life. The most important problems in MANET are Routing, Quality of Service, Security, Power management and Traffic and Mobility modeling and we plan to address many of these issues. In a MANET, when a mobile node has a packet to send, it first consults its route cache to determine whether it already has a route to destination, else it initiates route discovery by broadcasting. Once a route is established, its continuation and maintenance is of prime concern for efficient communication. A route could be broken by mobility and is determined by route error packets. Rather than employing a conventional way of global re-flooding for a new route search, we address this by Local Route Repair (LLR) approach and achieve re-connectivity with minimum overhead. Further work is needed to extend our scheme by increasing the length of patch-up part. We expect this to yield a higher amount of savings in terms of routing overhead and delay when unidirectional links are present. We also plan to define an analytical framework for different protocols and determine their performance. The need for scheduling in a MANET arises primarily due to limited availability of resources. We plan to study the impact of packet level scheduling strategies that transmit packets based on a metric derived from characteristics of the data being transmitted, like the length of the packets or the length of the route being traversed by the packets or even the priority of the packets. We plan to test other routing schemes and define and formulate an analytical model for packet queue at each node so that we could determine end-to-end delay of different types of packets. Effective operation of MANETs is dependent on maintaining appropriate routing information in a distributed fashion. Confidentiality of routing information is important so that not only the payload data but also the routing message headers carrying, the location information of the mobile nodes can be exchanged securely. We have defined an authentication scheme that can prevent the external attacks. We minimize substantial overhead by performing mutual authentication using challenge-response mechanism along the reply path only when the route reply is received. We plan to propose a distributed intrusion detection system to handle them. We will build these systems based on traffic profiles that we would obtain after extensive study of the traffic patterns. We are planning to perform a detailed simulation to obtain metrics that would help us in differentiating valid and malicious data. Wireless sensor networks can be easily deployed without any installation costs or pre-planned organization. To increase fault tolerance, thousands of these sensors might be employed. The traditional routing protocols defined for wireless ad hoc network do not scale well for sensor networks as they are data centric and application-specific unlike traditional networks. Most protocols for sensor network collect data periodically from environment. We feel that there exists a need for networks geared towards responding immediately to changes in the sensed attributes. Very recently, we have proposed a protocol called TEEN for such networks. We are also looking at ways to combine the best features of both proactive and reactive protocols to form a hybrid network. We also believe that sensor networks should provide the end user with the ability to control the three-way trade-off between energy efficiency, accuracy and response time dynamically. In brief, the proposal research will have a long-term impact on the robustness and security of MANETs and sensor networks.