ROBUST: Reliable overlay based utilisation of services and topology for emergency MANETs

Emergency services and networks are an emerging area of scientific research. During an emergency scenario such as forest fires, earthquakes, tsunamis and terrorist attacks rescuers need to establish communication to coordinate their actions by using smart and lightweight mobile devices. To this end, autonomous networks should be utilised to support the afore communications. Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are a characteristic paradigm of IP-based autonomous networks that can be deployed during critical emergency missions. We propose utilising a peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm when designing application layer communication and data sharing technologies between participants of the MANET. The architecture therefore must allow nodes to send and retrieve data without knowledge of the complexities of the network. To this end we propose a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) architecture which we optimise for use in these situations and prove our theorem to be more efficient in such cases than its current counterpart.