A Novel Routing Protocol for Large Scale Disconnected Environments

This project aims is to explore how wireless mobile networks can support a very large number of users in establishing and maintaining communication in environments with little or no existing network infrastructure e.g. rescue missions in the areas affected by disasters such as the Tsunami. The challenges facing the networking community for supporting such mass-scale applications are fundamental and profound. One of the most basic requirements for traditional and mobile ad hoc networking is that a fully connected path between all end points that wish to communicate must exist for communication to be possible. In the above Tsunami scenario this is not the case because some end points might be almost permanently disconnected, and new, non-traditional approaches to networking are needed to enable communication. We wish to develop a novel optimised routing protocol for providing ubiquitous connectivity to large number of users and devices at manageable cost in the face of frequently disconnected infrastructure. We will do this by combining scaleable mobile ad hoc routing approaches and delay tolerant network routing approaches. We apply for a PhD studentship and technical resources to develop this protocol through the modelling and simulation.