Adaptive and Secure Routing Protocol for Emergency Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

TL;DR

This paper presents an adaptive, secure routing protocol tailored for emergency mobile ad hoc networks (eMANETs), enabling reliable communication among lightweight devices during critical situations like fires or attacks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel routing protocol specifically designed for emergency scenarios, balancing security and efficiency in lightweight MANET devices.

Findings

The protocol improves security without excessive overhead.

Performance comparisons show competitive efficiency with existing protocols.

Secure communication is feasible on resource-constrained devices.

Abstract

The nature of Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) makes them suitable to be utilized in the context of an extreme emergency for all involved rescue teams. We use the term emergency MANETs (eMANETs) in order to describe next generation IP-based networks, which are deployed in emergency cases such as forest fires and terrorist attacks. The main goal within the realm of eMANETs is to provide emergency workers with intelligent devices such as smart phones and PDAs. This technology allows communication "islets" to be established between the members of the same or different emergency teams (policemen, firemen, paramedics). In this article, we discuss an adaptive and secure routing protocol developed for the purposes of eMANETs. We evaluate the performance of the protocol by comparing it with other widely used routing protocols for MANETs. We finally show that the overhead introduced due to security considerations is affordable to support secure ad-hoc communications among lightweight devices.