A secure group-based communication scheme in disaster response environment using delay tolerant network

Abstract

When a major disaster strikes, large parts of the critical infrastructure can be completely debilitated for weeks. In such situations the principal need is to quickly re-establish minimal communication infrastructures for support of rescue operations. For this purpose smart phone-based ad hoc opportunistic network can be built to rescue people from different affected areas. Relief workers from different agencies divide into small groups based on different categories of needs. In such sensational environments secure and immediate group communication among small groups and to the remote monitoring system is urgent as there can be some malicious nodes that intend to intercept and alter sensitive data for the purpose of corruption. To implement group communication using Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) some authorized carrier nodes can be allocated to deliver messages and shared group keys can be assigned for encryption-decryption purposes. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated on ONE simulator (The Opportunistic Network Environment Simulator) version 1.4.1.