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.

The self-organised nature of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) makes it a suitable candidate for rescuer communication in disaster scenarios. This paper presents a model basis for supporting the design of hybrid and adaptive routing protocols such as ChaMeLeon (CML). A size threshold point between proactive and reactive routing approaches is established using a probabilistic analytical model using dimensional cardinalities of the effective operation area, called the critical area (CA). CML adapts its routing behaviour according to the network size in order to improve overall routing efficiency while preserving acceptable quality of service (QoS) relative to well known protocols that are Ad hoc Ondemand Distance Vector (AODV) routing and Optimized Link Sate Routing (OLSR). These are also constituents of the reactive and proactive routing parts of CML respectively. The Evaluation section contains simulation results to support our analytical models and to compare the performance of CML with state of the art MANET routing protocols considering disaster scenarios with free space as well as obstacle prone environments also used to establish our models. We finally discuss the results and present some conclusions.

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Serverless distributed computing, especially Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs) have received significant attention from the research community. Peer-to-peer overlay networks have the potential to accommodate large-scale, decentralised applications that can be integrated into a MANET architecture to enable peer-to-peer communication among different mobile peers. These overlay architectures must be very resilient and their utilisation, reliability and availability must satisfy the needs of mobile computing. One must also heed the fact that the wireless nature of the medium introduces security vulnerabilities. The aim of the work described in this paper is twofold. First, we describe our peer-to-peer distributed hash table (DHT) architecture entitled Reliable Overlay Based Utilisation of Services and Topology (ROBUST). This is designed to be efficiently applied to MANETs. We additionally propose security extensions to protect the ROBUST signalling messages against malicious activities. We evaluate the ROBUST performance as well as the security extensions under varying levels of mobility and network sizes by building a custom DHT module for the network simulator ns-2. The outcome of the results show negligible overhead introduced by the extensions giving credence to their application in security sensitive scenarios.