Topology Control and Hop-by-hop Authentication in MANETs with Cooperative Communications

Cooperative communications can significantly enhance transmission reliability and bandwidth efficiency in wireless networks. However, the impact of cooperative communications on network-level upper layer issues, such as topology control, routing and network capacity, is largely ignored. At the same time, security is an important issue in MANETs and existing security schemes have significant impact on throughput. In this paper, a security cum topology control scheme, called COCO+ALPHA scheme to improve the network capacity as well as to provide the security in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) with cooperative communications is presented. Both upper layer network capacity and physical layer relay selections are considered in the proposed scheme. Keywords— Cooperative communication, security, network capacity, MANETs, topology control.