SAGE-PRoPHET: A Security Aided and Group Encounter based PRoPHET Routing Protocol for Dissemination of Post Disaster Situational Data

Abstract

In this paper, we propose SAGE-PRoPHET, a security enhanced PRoPHET routing protocol that enables secure dissemination of post disaster situational messages using history of group encounters. Post disaster rescue and relief operations are essentially group based, where volunteers and rescue workers, belonging to different rescue groups, relay situational information relevant to their group to their respective relief camps, in multiple hops on a peer-to-peer basis. Now, it is evidently better to route situational information, destined for a relief camp of a particular group, through volunteers of that group or who has a history of encountering volunteers of that group frequently. Such history of encounters based routing resembles the PRoPHET routing protocol for delay tolerant networks that forwards messages intended to a particular receiver through those nodes that encounter that receiver frequently. However, to use PRoPHET for such group based routing of group specific messages the protocol needs to be tuned to use history of group encounters rather than individual encounters. On the other hand, PRoPHET assumes that nodes in the network are trusted and cooperate towards message forwarding. Such assumption turns out inaccurate in presence of malicious nodes that may severely impede the delivery, accuracy and timeliness of situational messages. Therefore, integrating proper security components with PRoPHET is extremely important. Our proposed protocol adapts PRoPHET for post disaster group encounter based routing and enhances it by incorporating certain security elements into it to provide full security against possible attacks by malicious nodes in the network. Simulation results show that our proposed protocol, in a disaster scenario, offers better performance in comparison to other well known routing protocols.