Security and quality provisioning in wireless networks

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.