MANET for Disaster Relief based on NDN

During disaster relief situation, there is an acute need for reliable/efficient communication and content distribution, which can be supported by Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) and Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN). Traditional IP protocol performs inefficiently in MANET, while Named Data Networking (NDN) can be more beneficial because of many inbuilt features. In this paper, we propose a solution to adopt NDN for communication in the specific context of disaster relief. Firstly, we propose a proactive routing protocol which is also reactive-routing-enabled. Every node broadcasts their existence to neighbors and synchronizes the Network Information Base in order to update its own FIB. A universal entry set in FIB can be used to probe potential paths. It also remains multiple next-hops for every prefix in FIB in order to support multipath forwarding. Secondly, by duplicating or splitting the queue of Interests at a node, it's able to utilize multipath so as to improve transmission reliability or efficiency. For the convenience of future work, our experiments are carried out in a real platform consisting of some smart cars equipped with Raspberry Pi. Evaluation results show our solution is able to build a communication network by nodes themselves, and supports multipath forwarding with high reliability/efficiency in a disaster relief scenario.