Real-time systems with mobile ad hoc networks (mRTS) have potential applications in many areas, including scientific research, healthcare, disaster recovery, environment control, military and homeland security, and industrial process control. For example, such systems can provide mission critical support for operations in disaster and rescue situations, such as the recent devastating tsunamis throughout South Asia, where the entire communication infrastructure was destroyed. This research focuses on system requirements for security, survivability and real-time performance by focusing on three interacting aspects: specification and analysis of security and real-time requirements for mRTS; constraint-aware survivable communication techniques to provide reliable wireless communication in mRTS; and integration of security, fault-tolerant real-time performance, and survivable wireless communication for mRTS. The project seeks to develop: (a) a general mRTS model and a policy specification language for specifying security and real-time requirements, (b) algorithms for constraint-aware fault tolerant topology control in MANETs, (c) a channel access scheduling protocol for real-time applications that are delay-sensitive and delay-stringent. This research builds on prior work that developed a Time-triggered Message-triggered Object programming and specification framework, and a situation-aware distributed security policy enforcement scheme.
The results of this research are expected to greatly improve mobile ad hoc network applicatons, such as disaster rescue and will foster interaction between ad-hoc networks and the existing global information infrastructure. New course materials are being developed in secure and survivable real-time systems, and results are freely disseminated on the web.
