Enabling Secure High-Performance Wireless Ad Hoc Networking

摘要

A revolution has occurred in wireless communications over the last decade. Advances in processing power have enabled widespread deployment of radio networks as well as portable devices that can make use of such networks. Wireless networks have become more convenient and affordable and have spread to even fairly stationary applications such as home networking and community networking. Ad hoc networks can extend the range of such wireless networks: in an ad hoc network nodes cooperate to dynamically establish routing among themselves a packet sent by one node may be forwarded in turn by a sequence of other nodes allowing the packet to reach a destination beyond the sender wireless transmission range. This thesis discusses improvements to service in ad hoc network routing. Since different networks require different types of service, I propose several mechanisms to improve service in various network conditions. One example of service is Quality-of-Service (QoS ) since certain networks may desire some flows to have priority over other flows. Many of the mechanisms presented here make no distinction between lower and higher priority traffic and in may evaluation I only examine performance metrics aggregated over all flows rather than the performance of a few select flows. Another area encompassed by service is security. In particular when an attacker is present in the network a protocol that provides security against such an attacker should provide better service than one that does not. For example a secure protocol should deliver more packets incur less overhead or conserve overall network power usage better than in insecure protocol when the network is under attack. As a network experiences attack a secure network routing protocol may continue to provide some level of service whereas a traditional network routing protocol may fail completely.