A Reliable Routing Scheme for Post-Disaster Ad Hoc Communication Networks

The natural or man-made disaster demands an efficient communication and coordination among first responders for successful emergency management operations. During emergency situations such as an earthquake or a flood, the traditional telecommunication infrastructure may be damaged and may not provide adequate communication services to emergency management teams. Mobile ad hoc networks are used in such type of situations for exchanging emergency related information. During emergency situation, the deployed ad hoc communication network may itself be prone to failures and vulnerable to malicious threats. The first responders use real-time applications for exchanging emergency related information, which may create network congestion. The significant loss of emergency related information may cause mismanagement of emergency response efforts. We propose a reliable routing scheme for postdisaster ad hoc communication networks, which finds the shortest possible routes with all reliable nodes. The proposed scheme also detects packet forwarding misbehavior caused by network fault or congestion in an active route and reroutes packets through other reliable route. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and routing overhead through extensive simulations.