NeTS:Small: How to Exploit Social Network Theory in Designing Secure Wireless Networks

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Securing cyberspace is one of the top priorities in protecting our national infrastructure. As wireless ad hoc networks (WANETs) have been built to access or been parts of the Internet, they become the weakest links which should be secured and protected. This project investigates security issues in WANETs, such as trust establishment and management, secure connectivity, efficient secure routing and their performance, by utilizing the social network theory (including tools such as graph theory, percolation theory and hyperbolic geometry). First, the results in empirical social network studies are utilized to improve our understanding of the properties of the trust and physical network graphs, the existence and distribution of secure paths, and secure connectivity in WANETs. Second, by mimicking the social behavior of individuals, new methodologies are established to design efficient and scalable multi-hop communication schemes in WANETs. Finally, the project investigates the secure efficiency of a WANET as the end-to-end secure throughput and delay and conduct formal analysis of secure network performance and trade-off between security and throughput/delay. This project opens a new research direction in wireless networks and invents novel network design methodologies.The proposed research has broad impacts in many aspects including securing national cyberspace, creating multidisciplinary research themes mixing sociology, mathematics and wireless networks, disseminating the research findings to multiple communities of interest through publications in journals and conferences, and training the future multidisciplinary work force for telecommunications and information industries.