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

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A Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is a collection of mobile autonomous system of nodes connectedby wireless links with multi-hop communication and no underlying infrastructure. Research in the field ofMANET is receiving unprecedented attention due to their profound impact on human life. The mostimportant problems in MANET are Routing, Quality of Service, Security, Power management and Trafficand 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 determinewhether it already has a route to destination, else it initiates route discovery by broadcasting. Once a routeis established, its continuation and maintenance is of prime concern for efficient communication. A routecould be broken by mobility and is determined by route error packets. Rather than employing aconventional 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 extendour scheme by increasing the length of patch-up part. We expect this to yield a higher amount of savingsin terms of routing overhead and delay when unidirectional links are present. We also plan to define ananalytical 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 tostudy the impact of packet level scheduling strategies that transmit packets based on a metric derivedfrom characteristics of the data being transmitted, like the length of the packets or the length of the routebeing traversed by the packets or even the priority of the packets. We plan to test other routing schemesand define and formulate an analytical model for packet queue at each node so that we could determineend-to-end delay of different types of packets.Effective operation of MANETs is dependent on maintaining appropriate routing information in adistributed fashion. Confidentiality of routing information is important so that not only the payload databut also the routing message headers carrying, the location information of the mobile nodes can beexchanged securely. We have defined an authentication scheme that can prevent the external attacks. Weminimize substantial overhead by performing mutual authentication using challenge-response mechanismalong the reply path only when the route reply is received. We plan to propose a distributed intrusiondetection system to handle them. We will build these systems based on traffic profiles that we wouldobtain after extensive study of the traffic patterns. We are planning to perform a detailed simulation toobtain metrics that would help us in differentiating valid and malicious data.Wireless sensor networks can be easily deployed without any installation costs or pre-plannedorganization. To increase fault tolerance, thousands of these sensors might be employed. The traditionalrouting protocols defined for wireless ad hoc network do not scale well for sensor networks as they aredata centric and application-specific unlike traditional networks. Most protocols for sensor networkcollect data periodically from environment. We feel that there exists a need for networks geared towardsresponding immediately to changes in the sensed attributes. Very recently, we have proposed a protocolcalled TEEN for such networks. We are also looking at ways to combine the best features of bothproactive and reactive protocols to form a hybrid network. We also believe that sensor networks shouldprovide 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 onthe robustness and security of MANETs and sensor networks.