WORLDCOMP'10 Tutorial: Dr. Ziping Liu

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a network that does not have underlying infrastructure. Hosts in MANET are connected by wireless links with multi-hop communication. Since MANET supports anytime-anywhere communication and is easy to deploy, it can be widely used in applications where access to fixed infrastructure is not available, such as emergency rescue, battlefield and ubiquitous videoconference, etc. However, such networks pose profound problems such as limited power energy and channel bandwidth, shared medium and fragile network topology. Besides, MANET’s highly self-organized and self-maintained attributes increase its vulnerability to be attacked. Examples of attacks include Denial of Service (DoS), node impersonation, information disclosure, message injection, Continuous Channel Access (Exhaustion), routing disruptions, Sinkhole, Wormhole, and Node Capture. These attacks can happen at any layer in network protocol stack. Thus, it is essential to provide security services in order to overcome those threats. This tutorial presents a cross-layer design approach for MANET in achieving security and QoS.

In design a security-sensitive MANET with QoS requirements, we first need to consider security, which includes availability, confidentiality, integrity, authentication and non-repudiation. In this tutorial, we address the vulnerability of 802.11 DCF in a hostile environment and the challenges of key management in MANET. We then introduce how asymmetric public key schemes as well as symmetric private key schemes work in MANET and how trustable relationships among MANET nodes are built. Support for QoS is required for applications with a mix of real-time data and burst data. In order to optimize network performance, cross-layer design has raised a lot of attention in MANET research. The goal of cross-layer design is to seek collaboration among protocols in different stack protocol layers. In this tutorial, we cover the design schemes for data link layer and network layer, which include channel access, packet priority distribution and power saving support at data link layer, plus end-to-end latency, power saving, load balancing, and channel bandwidth reservation at network layer. We will also demonstrate the use of a network simulator such as QualNet in MANET research.

• Get an overview of mobile ad hoc network and the challenges of its research and application
• Understand various attacks in MANET and compare different key management schemes
• Gain knowledge of cross-layer design which includes channel access, packet priority distribution and power saving support at data link layer; plus end-to-end latency, power saving, load balancing, and channel bandwidth reservation at network layer

Intended audience include undergraduate and graduate students, faculties, researchers, network software developers, network administrators who are interested in wireless network communication.

Ziping Liu is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Southeast Missouri State University, USA. She holds a PhD from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Before she joined the faculty of Southeast Missouri State University, she was a software engineer at Motorola. She has been active in mobile computing research and development for more than ten years. Dr. Liu has served as technical committee member for a number of professional conferences and has published over 30 papers in international journals and conferences. She was also invited to give guest lecture “Wireless Network with Emphasis on Mobile Ad Hoc Network” for NSF REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) at University of Missouri – Columbia. Her research interests include wireless network protocols, network QoS, modeling and performance evaluation in ad hoc networks/sensor networks and distributed computing.