A Joint Design for Topology and Security in MANETs with Cooperative Communications

Security is an important issue in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). However, security schemes have significant impacts on throughput. That is because 1) they need some overhead and consume some network resources, thus decrease throughput consequently, 2) most previous works consider security and throughput separately in designing a MANET, which can not achieve an overall optimization of network performance. In this paper, we propose a topology control scheme to improve throughput by jointly designing upper layer security schemes and physical layer schemes related to channel conditions and relay selections for cooperative communications. Simulation results show that our scheme can substantially improve throughput in MANETs.