Mobile Ad-hoc Network is a temporary infrastructureless wireless network composed of mobile hosts. My research focuses on autoconfiguration, security, and applications in MANETs.
For small scale MANETs, it may be simple and efficient to allocate free IP addresses manually. However, the procedure becomes difficult and impractical for a large-scale open system where mobile nodes are free to join and leave. Automatic address allocation is more difficult in a MANET environment than that in hardwired networks due to instability of mobile nodes, low bandwidth of wireless links, openness of MANET, and lack of central administration. However, since address allocation is the first step toward the practical application of the MANET, it is worth further research effort.
The presence of an autoconfiguration scheme poses a problem for threshold cryptography-based distributed certificate authority scheme, which is vulnerable to Sybil attacks. We're working on the secure autoconfiguration and a different security framework for MANETs.