The flexibility and mobility of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) have made them increasingly popular in a wide range of use cases. To protect these networks, security protocols have been developed to protect routing and application data. However, these protocols only protect routes or communication, not both. Both secure routing and communication security protocols must be implemented to provide full protection. The use of communication security protocols originally developed for wireline and WiFi networks can also place a heavy burden on the limited network resources of a MANET. To address these issues, a novel secure framework (SUPERMAN) is proposed. The framework is designed to allow existing network and routing protocols to perform their functions, whilst providing node authentication, access control, and communication security mechanisms. This paper presents a novel security framework for MANETs, SUPERMAN. Simulation results comparing SUPERMAN with IPsec, SAODV, and SOLSR are provided to demonstrate the proposed frameworks suitability for wireless communication security.

This paper presents a novel extension to the Consensus-Based Bundle Algorithm (CBBA), which we have named Cluster-Formed Consensus-Based Bundle Algorithm (CFCBBA). CF-CBBA is designed to reduce the amount of communication required to complete a distributed task allocation process, by partitioning the problem and processing it in parallel clusters. CF-CBBA has been shown, in comparison with baseline CBBA, to require less communication when allocating tasks. Three key aspects of task allocation have been investigated, (a) the time taken to allocate tasks, (b) the amount of communication necessary to satisfy the requirements of distributed task allocation algorithms such as CBBA, and (c) the efficiency with which a collection of tasks (a mission) is completed by a group of robots (a collective).