Security and Quality Provisioning in Wireless Networks

Abstract:
The ubiquitous presence and ease of connectivity for mobile devices are the driving force for the popularity of wireless networks. With the widespread usage, provisioning quality and securing wireless communication has become crucial necessities. However, the inherent characteristic of wireless networks, namely, unguided medium, variable link qualities, and interferences, create impositions to the quality and security concerns. In this talk, we will overview two of our recent efforts: quality provisioning for video services over wireless networks, and techniques for securing wireless communications by exploiting wireless physical layer characteristics. We will discuss quality metrics for video over wireless and recent works on bootstrapping secure association between nearby devices, generating shared secret-key from wireless channels, and detecting identity based attacks in wireless networks. Experimental implementations and evaluations will be presented to validate the proposed schemes. We will conclude the talk with an overview of our wireless experimental test-bed: QuRiNet.

Bio:
Dr. Prasant Mohapatra is currently the Tim Bucher Family Endowed Chair Professor and Chairman of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. He has been on the faculty at Iowa State University and Michigan State University. He has also held Visiting Scientist positions at Intel Corporation, Panasonic Technologies, Institute of Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore, and National ICT Australia (NICTA), and Visiting Professorship at the University of Padova, Italy and Yonsei University, South Korea. He was/is on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, ACM WINET, and Ad Hoc Networks. He has been on the program and organizational committees of several international conferences. He served as the General Chair of IEEE SECON 2011, Program Vice-Chair of INFOCOM 2004 and the Program Chair of SECON 2004, QShine 2006, WoWMoM 2009, and IEEE MASS 2010. He has been a Guest Editor for IEEE Network, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Communications, IEEE Wireless Communications, and the IEEE Computer.

Dr. Mohapatra is a Fellow of the IEEE. He received his doctoral degree from Penn State University in 1993, and received an Outstanding Engineering Alumni Award in 2008. He has also received an Outstanding Engineering Faculty Award from UC Davis.

Dr. Mohapatra's research interests are in the areas of wireless networks, security, Internet protocols, and QoS in both wired and wireless networks. Dr. Mohapatra's research has been funded though grants from the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Intel Corporation, Siemens, Panasonic Technologies, Hewlett Packard, AT&T, and EMC Corporation.