A role-based routing solution for MANET to support hierarchical rescue teams in emergency scenarios

In emergency scenarios, groups of people from different organizations, such as hospitals and the police, must be able to communicate in order to coordinate their efforts in such scenarios. Nevertheless, in emergency scenarios a fixed, predefined infrastructure may not be available or reliable, and to interconnect, mobile devices rely on Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) technology. Although MANET routing protocols allow devices to interconnect autonomously and share information, they do not cover the different needs of these groups. This work proposes a new approach to meet these requirements in MANETs running the HTR protocol. We propose an organization-based scheme to achieve role-based goals via high level policies. As a proof of concept, we develop and evaluate a policy to increase the lifetime of a specific group of nodes by influencing the weighs of the network graph. Our results show how the proposed approach can successfully and efficiently influence the behavior of nodes in order to achieve role-based goals improving communication.