A generalized framework for disruption tolerant secure opportunistic routing during emergency situations using MANETs

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) play a constitutive role in the field of telecommunication. It enables communication between moving nodes by using auto-node configuration and multi hop wireless routing strategies. During disasters, the existing telecommunication structure is either completely destroyed or partially collapsed. Thus, it is very difficult to perform data communications during that period and also it takes more time to restore it to its original structure. The purpose of this research paper is to ensure reliable and secured communication using opportunistic routing between mobile nodes during such emergency situations. The existing methods of the disaster routing protocols do not guarantee reliable delivery of data in a secured manner and it assumes that the nodes are configured with a unique IP address before participating in the communication. This paper presents a novel framework disruption tolerant secure opportunistic routing (DTSOR) method that ensures secure communication between high mobility nodes. Cluster based address auto configuration mechanism and trace analysis are preferred methods used to select the optimal path for forwarding the packets. Selected path further ensures security using puzzle based data anonymization method. Performance analysis and simulation results shows that proposed framework outperforms the state of the art approaches in terms of the packet delivery ratio, network overhead and throughput.