Research Project Title
Security and Trustworthiness in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Principal Investigators
R. Srikant

Unit # 25
Project Overview

Trustworthiness and security are two issues that have to be addressed before ad-hoc wireless networks can become commercially viable. A basic requirement is that the users should have enough trust in the service provided by the network, i.e., they should have no doubt that their packets will be reliably delivered to their intended destinations. The primary concern of this project is the challenge posed by the presence of selfish or malicious nodes in the network. For example, it is difficult to prevent a selfish or malicious node from affecting the performance of the rest of the network by either dropping or excessively delaying packets. Even if a node realizes that some of its packets are being intentionally dropped, it may be difficult for it to reliably distinguish between misbehaving nodes and compliant nodes on its path. Further, existing protocols for sharing resources in a multihop ad hoc wireless network do not utilize the available spectrum efficiently. Thus, it is imperative to design protocols that assure security and trustworthiness with minimum overhead so that resource utilization is maximized. Thus, our goal in this project is three-fold:

1. to develop algorithms to quickly route around congestion in the network, without initially identifying whether the congestion is caused by unintentional traffic overload or by misbehaving users,

2. to devise mechanisms to identify and isolate misbehaving users, and

3. to provide incentives to deter free-riding.

Presentation in PDF format