Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Sensor Networking
Traditional wireless networks have been infrastructure-based, i.e., typically there is a wired network infrastructure that supports “last hop” wireless links. Mobile phone systems are an example of such a traditional network, where the wireless communications is only between mobile phone and base station, and the rest of the network is wired. An alternative paradigm of wireless communications is where there is no fixed infrastructure, but where the communications nodes form a wireless network in an ad hoc manner, “on the fly”. Many interesting research problems have arisen, especially since nodes may be moving around, so the network topology of an ad hoc network changes frequently (thus, the popular term mobile ad hoc network, or MANET). While research in mobile ad hoc networks has in the past been associated with military-related applications only, there has been much recent interest in the use of such networks for commercial applications, e.g., for disaster/emergency situations, communications between cars, in construction sites, for medical applications, etc. Meanwhile, research in the related field of wireless sensor networks has exploded over the past few years, with the expectation that much of the future of wireless networking will involve the networking of embedded devices and sensors. We have been looking into some of the research issues in this area, using motes and simulations.
Principal Investigators
Projects
- Issues in commercialization of mobile ad hoc networks
- Inter-vehicular mobile ad hoc networks: challenges and solutions
- Security algorithms and architectures for mobile ad hoc networks
- Power-efficient data gathering algorithms for wireless sensor networks.
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