A Joint Design of Security and QOS Provisioning in MANET’s with Cooperative Communications

Cooperative communication has received tremendous interest for wireless networks. Most existing works on cooperative communications are focused on link-level physical layer issues. Consequently, the impacts of cooperative communications on network-level upper layer issues, such as topology control, routing and network capacity, are largely ignored. A multi hop wireless ad hoc network consists of a number of nodes that form a dynamic topology with ad hoc wireless links among neighbouring nodes. These nodes are typically limited in resources such as bandwidth, computation power, memory, and battery. Quality of Service (QoS) is usually defined as a set of service requirements that need to be met by the network while transporting a packet stream from source to destination. With the increasing needs of QoS provisioning for evolving applications such as real time audio/video, it is desirable to support these services in ad hoc networking environments. This thesis investigates QoS provisioning techniques for this type of networks.