Wireless Ad-Hoc Network Using PCs/Laptops in Disaster Struck Areas

Wireless Ad-Hoc Network Using PCs/Laptops in Disaster Struck Areas

Course: Capstone (TLEN 5710) Advisor: Mr. Jeffrey DiMaio Industry Contact: Mr. Jeff Smith (Cisco Systems) Team Members: Gauri Ratnakar Desai Chandini Usha Sree Bharathi Penmetsa Saurabh Dattatray Kadam Mandar Sridhar Alankar

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Wireless Ad-Hoc Network Using PCs/Laptops in Disaster Struck Areas

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Abstract Disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods can have a harsh impact on infrastructure based communication services like Internet and telephone. Real-time communications are critical in the early stages of disaster response and are used to provide life-saving aid. The use of Personal computers/Laptops to form a Wireless Ad-Hoc Network in such disaster struck areas can provide immediate Internet access to restore basic communication. A PC/Laptop that is closest to an alive Internet Gateway (IG) connects to it, runs an application designed to give it capabilities of a mesh router (access point) to provide further Internet connectivity to other PCs/Laptops in its RF range. This process is repeated to form an ad-hoc network and provide Internet connectivity to the clients. Some of the main challenges faced in such networks are best path selection to route data packets, bandwidth allocation and limitation, scalability and security. This paper proposes experimental evaluations to address the above-mentioned challenges. This paper also proposes a framework for implementing software that automates the ad-hoc network formation.

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Table of Contents

Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... 2 Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... 3 Research Question and Problem setting ..................................................................................... 4 Research Sub-problems ................................................................................................................ 4 Routing Protocol ................................................................................................................ 4 Bandwidth allocation and limitation ................................................................................. 5 Scalability ........................................................................................................................... 5 Security ............................................................................................................................... 5 Literature Review ......................................................................................................................... 6 Research Methodology ................................................................................................................. 8 Routing Protocol ................................................................................................................ 8 Bandwidth allocation and limitation ............................................................................... 10 Scalability ......................................................................................................................... 12 Security ............................................................................................................................. 13 Research Results ......................................................................................................................... 13 Routing Protocol .............................................................................................................. 13 Bandwidth allocation and limitation ............................................................................... 15 Scalability ......................................................................................................................... 16 Security ............................................................................................................................. 17 Discussion of Results ................................................................................................................... 17 Routing Protocol .............................................................................................................. 17 Bandwidth allocation and limitation ............................................................................... 18 Scalability ......................................................................................................................... 19 Security ............................................................................................................................. 21 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 21 Future Research .......................................................................................................................... 22 References .................................................................................................................................... 24

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Research Question and Problem Setting Provisioning immediate communication becomes a challenging task in disaster struck areas. Communication is of prime importance during situations of calamity, as the first responders in a calamity struck area need to send constant updates about the calamity situation to the rescue teams, so that concrete rescue plan can be built (Minh, Nguyen, & Yamada, 2013). People would also want to communicate with their family and friends about their safety and would want to access news for constant updates about the situation. The use of Personal computers/Laptops to form a Wireless Ad-Hoc Network in such disaster struck areas can provide Internet access to restore basic communication. This research paper addresses the question of, “How can Personal Computers (PCs)/Laptops be used to form a Wireless Ad-Hoc Network that can provide immediate and secure Internet access to people in disaster struck areas?” In Wireless Ad-Hoc Network technology, every network node communicates with its neighbor nodes to form a mesh-like network. Along with being highly reliable, Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks can also support transmission of real time data such as, digital maps and live videos of the disaster struck areas, which may be of great use to the rescue personnel to decide their next move in the rescue operation. Research Sub-problems 1. Routing: Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks consist of PCs/Laptops, which act as Access Points (adhoc nodes) to route packets from users towards the Internet gateway, known as the “Root”. The ad-hoc nodes need a routing protocol to determine the best route to reach the root and handle any possible routing loops formation. The routing protocol should be capable of

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running on PCs/Laptops and be optimized to introduce less routing overhead (due to the limited bandwidth availability). Moreover, since the Ad-Hoc Networks are highly dynamic, the routing protocol used should be proactive in selecting routes or best paths. It should also take into account the wireless metrics such as SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) and RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication). Although there are various routing protocols available for general wireless mesh networks, it is important to determine which of them can be used to achieve the routing needs of a Wireless Ad-Hoc networks. 2. Bandwidth allocation and limitation: The networks in calamity struck areas experience high amount of traffic as everyone is trying to reach the Internet at the same time, thereby increasing the load on the network and reducing its performance. How can bandwidth allocation and limitation be implemented so that each user gets a fixed minimum bandwidth to carry out basic communication? The minimum bandwidth allocation should take into account the routing overhead. 3. Scalability: The data rates a user can achieve in a Wireless Ad-Hoc Network depends on the distance from the ad-hoc node and the number of hops from the root. As the ad-hoc nodes need to share the bandwidth provided by the root, the data rates decrease with each hop count. How scalable is the Wireless Ad-Hoc Network? What is the maximum hop count that can be achieved before a user gets data rates below an acceptable value? 4. Security: Since PCs/Laptops act as wireless ad-hoc nodes, there can be a security risk as these PCs/Laptops are accessed by other users to route data packets. What level of security must be in place so that confidentiality, data integrity, and authenticity are guaranteed to users of the Wireless Ad-Hoc Network?

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Literature Review This section describes some of the work that has been done by various researchers on Wireless Mesh and Ad-Hoc Networks. Zakrzewska, Koszałka, & Poźniak-Koszałka (2008) evaluate the performance of various routing protocols, which are being widely used in wireless mesh networks. They study the response of proactive routing protocols like Dynamic Sequenced Distance Vector routing protocol (DSDV), Optimized Link State Routing protocol (OLSR) and reactive routing protocols like Ad-hoc On- Demand Distance Vector Routing protocol (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) under different network size, node mobility, and network load. Most present routing protocols use minimum hop-count as a metric to decide the best path in the network. This a suitable method in wired communications but not suitable in the case of wireless networks, which may experience high interference and low throughput problems. As a solution to this, they have proposed different metrics like Expected Transmission Time and Expected Transmission count. Rahman, Azad, & Anwar (2009) propose the use of Ad- hoc OnDemand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol, which integrates all the metrics to attain an optimal routing protocol. Besides that, Jacquet, Muhlethaler, Laouiti, Qayyum, & Viennot (2001), have proposed that OLSR can be used to deal with a high rate of topological changes and limited bandwidth that can be supported by a WMN. This is because OLSR uses a set of nodes to retransmit the control messages, which reduces the overhead traffic. Moreover, they also stated that as OLSR is proactive and self-organizing, it could also handle the topological changes in the WMN. Hiertz et al. (2010) provide insights into the latest developments in IEEE 802.11s and describe the forwarding and routing features of the WLAN Mesh Standard. Ibars, Coso, Grunenberger, Theoleyre & Rousseau (2007) propose the use of co-operative techniques to increase the throughput of wireless mesh network. They make use of virtual links

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at the physical layer for data transmission and reception. These virtual links appear as regular links to the routing protocols running in the network. Dilmaghani & Rao (2008) discuss the advantages of ad-hoc networks by citing many real life incidents. They discuss about technologies like Distributed Test Bed for First Responders (DTFR) and Mobile Emergency Response Support (MERS), radios working on VHF/UHF band and 800MHz, fiber optic based data networks used for emergency correspondence have failed to setup communication with disaster struck areas. Shibata, Sato, Ogasawara, Chiba, & Takahata (2009) propose a balloon supported wireless mesh technology, in which balloons attached with antennas supporting wireless LANs IEEE 802.11j and IEEE 802.11b/g are used to form a wireless mesh network in the sky covering the disaster struck area. Anjum & Mouchtaris (2007) in their work describe the attacks on Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks to be ranging from passive eavesdropping to active interfering. Some example attacks that are possible in an Ad-Hoc setting are: Routing Attacks, Location Disclosure, Eavesdropping, Sleep Deprivation, Traffic Analysis, Denial of Service and Sybil Attack. They propose techniques to avoid these kind of attacks, which are: key management (Asymmetric and Symmetric key based approach), secure routing (secure AODV, Authenticated Routing, security aware Ad-Hoc routing), intrusion detection systems (Noncollaborative and collaborative intrusion detection systems), policy management (role based access control, firewall management and trust management) and secure localization (distance bounding techniques, verifiable multilateration, malicious beacons and so on).

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Research Methodology 1. Routing Protocol Test Set-up for Selection of Routing Protocol: We used OPNET Modeler, which is a simulator to create and test various networking environments and routing protocols. The simulations provide a comprehensive study of different Routing Protocols such as OLSR, AODV, and DSR. We made simulations with 15 mobile nodes, which would move randomly over defined area of 300 ft. × 300 ft. These mobile nodes represent laptops that would be used in real life scenarios to form the Mobile Ad-hoc networks. We set the power of each mobile node to 40 mW, which is the standard power of the RF radios used in most laptops. The network topology is shown in fig. 1.

Fig. 1: Network topology in OPNET

Application Configuration: Application Configuration is used to generate traffic in the simulated network. Different types of applications with different loads can be used to

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generate traffic across the simulated network. Table 1 shows the applications implemented on each node for the simulations and their corresponding load setting used.

Table 1: Applications and corresponding load settings used in OPNET

Mobility Configuration: The mobility configuration is used to set the speed of the mobile nodes. For the simulations described in this paper, we set the speed to 5 m/s for each mobile node. We set the pause time, which is the time for which the mobile node is stationary, to 180 seconds. We chose the Random waypoint mobility profile for each node, which enabled the nodes to move in a random direction. Performance Metrics: The following performance metrics were used to compare the different routing protocols. 

Routing traffic (overhead): This includes the routing overhead traffic that includes hello messages, route discovery messages, routing updates and route error messages.

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WLAN Delay: Delay is the ratio of difference between every packet sent and received to the time difference over the total number of received packets.

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MOS (Mean Opinion Score): It is a measure of voice and video quality. MOS value is a number between 1 and 5, 1 being worst and 5 being best.

Table 2 shows the simulation parameters that were used:

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Table 2: Simulation parameters and values

2. Bandwidth allocation and limitation: Test setup for bandwidth testing in Ad-Hoc Networks: In an ad-hoc network, as the number of hops increase, the effective bandwidth per hop decreases, thus affecting the scalability of ad-hoc networks. To test the bandwidth available per-hop, we conducted the following experiment with 4 laptops having IEEE 802.11 a/b/g WLAN card and operating on channel 6. We installed each laptop with Connectify and Iperf softwares. Connectify is a tool that allows laptops or personal computers to function as wireless routers. Iperf is a bandwidth testing tool, which measures data throughput across a link. Scenario 1: Testing bandwidth available at first hop (refer fig. 2)

Fig. 2: Bandwidth testing - Scenario 1

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We configured Laptop A, which was the Internet gateway (root), as an ad-hoc node by running Connectify on it. We configured a second laptop, laptop B, connected it to the root and ran Iperf on both the laptops. Iperf allows one device to function as a server while the number of clients can vary. We configured laptop A as an Iperf server, laptop B as an Iperf client and transferred a data file of 10 Mb from the client to the server. The Iperf server recorded the total time taken to transfer the data and the total available bandwidth between the server and the client. We repeated the same test by changing the distance between the server and the client. Scenario 2: Testing bandwidth available at second hop (fixed first hop) (refer fig. 3)

Fig. 3: Bandwidth testing - Scenario 2

We extended the topology used in scenario 1 to test the bandwidth at second hop, ran Connectify on laptop B and connected laptop C to it. We kept the distance between laptop B and laptop A constant at 35 ft and configured Laptop C as an Iperf client. The Iperf client sent a data file of 10 Mb to server. The server determined the total time taken to transfer the file and the bandwidth. We repeated the whole process by changing the distance of laptop C from laptop B. The bandwidth measurements at each hop helped us determine how far the ad-hoc network can be extended. Accordingly, we could determine the scalability (number of possible hops to deliver acceptable data rates at the last hop) of the ad-hoc network.

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Test Set-up for Bandwidth limiting in Ad-Hoc Networks: In a disaster struck situation, everyone is trying to access the Internet and a single user can clog up the whole bandwidth rendering very low to no bandwidth for others. Therefore, we decided to limit specific bandwidth to each user. We used Netlimiter to achieve this in our tests. Netlimiter is a bandwidth shaping, bandwidth limiting and a traffic monitoring tool. Step 1: Determined the bandwidth available at each hop in a 2 hop ad-hoc network. Step 2: Determined the standard bandwidth for different services like voice calls, video call, and data. Step 3: Determined the total number of video calls, voice calls per hop based on standard values (for voice, video and data) and experimentally obtained values. Step 4: Used Netlimiter on the laptops to limit the data bandwidth at every hop, so that a single user would not utilize the complete bandwidth at any of the hops. 3. Scalability: One of the most important requirements of the network being implemented in disaster struck areas is it to be scalable. To test the scalability of ad-hoc networks, we again used OPNET simulations. Simulation Scenario: We made simulations with 5 mobile nodes representing laptops, which would move randomly over defined area of 300 ft. × 300 ft. We used an FTP server in the scenario and set the node farthest from the FTP server to transfer a file of 1 Mb to the FTP server. We ran this simulation for 600 seconds and observed the delay. We repeated the

Wireless Ad-Hoc Network Using PCs/Laptops in Disaster Struck Areas

above test for 10, 15 and, 20 mobile nodes, observed the delay in each simulation and generated a graph of number of nodes versus the end-to-end delay. 4. Security: A major security concern we had was with the integrity of users’ personal data on their PCs/laptops. Other users who are a part of the ad-hoc network should not be able to accessible it. We configured inbound and outbound policies to deny or permit access using Windows Firewall on laptops to test for security issues. The policies were: 

Deny policy to block data for Remote access protocols

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Permit policy to allow data for Internet access protocols Research Results

We conducted various experiments in an attempt to address each sub problem. The results obtained are shown below: 1. Routing protocol: The graphs obtained for various performance metrics from OPNET are: Routing traffic:

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Wireless Ad-Hoc Network Using PCs/Laptops in Disaster Struck Areas

Fig. 4: Routing traffic comparison for 15 nodes

Fig. 4 shows the entire routing overhead traffic for 15 nodes running Http, voice and video conferencing applications simultaneously. Delay:

Fig. 5: Delay comparison for 15 nodes

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Wireless Ad-Hoc Network Using PCs/Laptops in Disaster Struck Areas

Fig. 5 shows the total average delay for 15 nodes running Http, voice and video conferencing applications simultaneously. MOS (Mean Opinion Score):

Fig. 6: MOS comparison for 15 nodes

Fig. 6 shows the MOS values for 15 nodes running Http, voice and video conferencing applications simultaneously. 2. Bandwidth allocation and limitation: We tested the bandwidth requirement at each hop of the network by creating a wireless ad-hoc network using laptops. We plotted graphs for both indoor and outdoor readings of bandwidth versus distance:

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Fig. 7(a) and fig. 7(b) represent the indoor and outdoor bandwidth measurements respectively for a single hop.

BANDWIDTH (MBPS)

50 40 30 20 10 0 0

50

100

150

BANDWIDTH (MBPS)

BANDWIDTH (MBPS)

BANDWIDTH (MBPS)

40 30 20 10 0 0

DISTANCE (FT)

50

100

150

DISTANCE (FT)

Fig. 7(a): Single hop bandwidth measurements (Indoor)

Fig. 7(b): Single hop bandwidth measurements (Outdoor)

Fig. 8(a) and fig. 8(b) represent the indoor and outdoor bandwidth measurements respectively for two hops.

BANDWIDTH (MBPS)

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BANDWIDTH (MBPS)

BANDWIDTH (MBPS)

BANDWIDTH (MBPS) 10 5 0 0

50

100

150

200

DISTANCE (FT)

Fig. 8(a): Two hops bandwidth measurements (Indoor)

3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 0

50

100

150

DISTANCE (FT)

Fig. 8(b): Two hops bandwidth measurements (Outdoor)

3. Scalability: Fig. 9 shows a graph of the scalability test, which is a plot of number of nodes versus delay.

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Scalability 70 65

Delay (µs)

60 55 50 45 40 35 30 0

5

10

15

20

25

No. of Nodes (Network Size)

Fig. 9: Scalability test results

4. Security: 

The deny policy blocked data for Remote Access, FTP, Telnet, and SSH

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The permit policy allowed access for ‘http’ and ‘https’ for Internet Access Discussion of Results

1. Routing protocol: Fig. 1 shows that OLSR routing protocol has the least routing overhead traffic as compared to AODV and DSR. Fig. 2 shows that OLSR has the lowest initial delay but as time progresses, AODV has a lower and constant delay value as compared to OLSR and DSR. From fig. 3, we found that OLSR has the highest MOS value for voice and video applications (average value of 2.8). AODV and DSR did not perform well with voice and video applications. From the analysis of above performance metrics, although the delay values of AODV are better compared to OLSR, OLSR provides better voice and video quality to the users and has a lower bandwidth requirement with regard to routing overhead. Therefore, we have decided

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to propose OLSR as the optimal routing protocol for ad-hoc networks in our research. In addition, the simulation results obtained above are for nodes running 3 applications (Http, voice and video) simultaneously. In a real scenario, it is highly unlikely that all users run all applications in parallel. Therefore, these are worst-case scenario results and we expect the results in an actual scenario to be much better than these. 2. Bandwidth allocation and limitation: Theoretically, available bandwidth reduces by half at each hop in an ad-hoc network. From figures 7(a) and 8(a), we can see that the results are close to theoretical values. We saw a drop in bandwidth from 30 Mbps at the first hop (distance of 25 ft.) to a value of 14 Mbps at the second hop (distance of 25ft.). On the other hand, the outdoor readings did not follow the same rule showing a drop in bandwidth from 30 Mbps at first hop (distance of 25 ft.) to a value of 3 Mbps at the second hop (distance of 25ft.). In an indoor scenario, reflections from the walls, floor and ceiling reduce the bandwidth and throughput achieved. Whereas in an outdoor scenario, there are no reflections and the bandwidth and throughput depends only on line of sight. From the readings and above graphs, we inferred the below: 

Distance between any 2 hops (ideally): 30 to 35 ft.

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Bandwidth Available at each Hop should be limited to: 1) First Hop: 25 Mbps 2) Second Hop: 13 Mbps 3) Third Hop: 5 Mbps

Table 3 shows the standard values of bandwidth required for different technologies.

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Table 3: Bandwidth required for different technologies

Fig. 10: Bandwidth design considerations

Based on the values in table 3 and the experimental readings, we propose a bandwidth design consideration for ad-hoc networks as shown in Fig. 10. It depicts the number of voice and video calls each hop can support with the available bandwidth. As seen in the figure, we propose limiting 5 Mbps for data (Http), 1.92 Mbps for video calls and 17.44 Mbps for voice calls, so that 15 video calls and 200 voice calls are supported at the first hop. Similarly, at the second hop, we propose limiting 2 Mbps for data (Http), 1.28 Mbps for video calls and 8.72 Mbps for voice calls, so that 10 video calls and 100 voice calls are supported. At the third hop, we propose limiting 1 Mbps for data (Http), 640 Kbps for video calls and 2.616 Mbps for voice calls, so that 5 video calls and 30 voice calls are supported. 3. Scalability:

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From fig. 9, we obtain the delay in transferring a 10 Mb file in an ad-hoc network topology with varying number of nodes. Table 4 shows these values.

Table 4: Delay in transferring 10 Mb file with varying number of nodes

From the above table, we infer that as the number of hops increase, the delay in data transfer also increases. Thus, when an ad-hoc network is small, scalability is not an issue but as the network size increases, it may face scalability issues. The following techniques when implemented can solve the scalability limitation: 1) The power transmitted from the laptop/PC antenna is a crucial factor that impacts scalability of laptop/PC based MANETs. The current estimated transmitted power of a laptop/PC antenna is 40 mW using an omnidirectional antenna. Laptops/PCs equipped with antennas having better transmission power can provide better scalability results. 2) The availability of better layer 3 standards like 802.11ac and 802.11s can improve scalability of MANETs. 3) The use of signal repeaters at fixed number of hops will help in improving the per hop bandwidth, thus providing better scalability. In addition, portable VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) modules, which provides Internet connectivity with the help of 2way satellite communication, can improve bandwidth or act as an Internet gateway (if live Internet Gateway cannot be found).

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4. Security: We applied the deny policy to block data for Remote Access protocols such as Remote Login, Telnet, Secure Shell (SSH), and File Transfer Protocol (FTP). The Remote Login and FTP protocols are switched on in most Enterprises for technical support purposes by the techsupport team. We designed the deny policy to block data for the following transfer layer port numbers (Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/User Datagram Protocol (UDP)):

Table 5: Protocols and port numbers they use

The permit policy allowed access to the Internet for all the laptops in the ad-hoc network. We designed the permit policy for Web Server (http – TCP port 80) and Secure Web Server (https – TCP port 443). Conclusion This research paper proposes the use of existing PCs/Laptops to set up an ad-hoc network that can provide Internet connectivity to people in disaster struck areas. It also addresses some of the major challenges faced in such ad-hoc networks. We made a comparative study and performance analysis of three prominent routing protocols namely OLSR, AODV, and DSR using OPNET simulator. The results show that OLSR outperformed AODV and DSR protocols.

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We also conducted experiments to analyze bandwidth requirement at each hop and proposed an ideal bandwidth limited model. Scalability is an important factor in ad-hoc networks. OPNET is used to test the scalability of ad-hoc networks and we observed that the available bandwidth drops significantly after every hop and becomes unusable after 4 to 5 hops. Further research, however, shows that improvement in layer 1 and layer 3 technologies in laptops/PCs can help overcome the scalability issues faced by the current system, thus becoming an important area of future research. The paper also focused on aspects to address security issues in the proposed PC/laptop based ad-hoc networks. Future Research Scalability of the network is one of the main challenges faced in an ad-hoc network. This is mainly because of the limitations of the radio currently equipped in laptops. IEEE 802.11ac, which is the latest wireless standard in the 802.11 family, has features such as wider channels, higher encoding density, increased number of spatial streams, beamforming, and multi-user MIMO (Multi Input Multi Output.) The cumulative benefit of these features of 802.11ac is that it provides higher data rates and link efficiencies as compared to its predecessors. The higher bandwidth and throughput can reduce the scalability issue of ad-hoc networks to a great extent. 802.11s is an IEEE standard that is being developed to support ad-hoc networking. This standard supports multi-hop communication in a cost-effective manner by allowing wireless frame forwarding and routing capabilities at the MAC (Medium Access Control) layer instead of depending on network layer (layer 3 in OSI model). This standard also supports seamless integration and built-in security for ad-hoc networks by introducing a new frame structure. So, once 802.11s chips are commercially available in the market, its additional features can help overcome problems with security and scalability in wireless ad-hoc networks.

Wireless Ad-Hoc Network Using PCs/Laptops in Disaster Struck Areas

This paper proposes a framework for the automation of the ad-hoc network setup process. Fig. 11 represents a flow chart of the framework of automation software.

Fig. 11: Flow chart for auto-configuration implementation

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Dilmaghani, R. B., and Rao, R. R. (2008), "An Ad Hoc Network Infrastructure: Communication and Information Sharing for Emergency Response" in IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing WIMOB ’08. doi: 10.1109/WiMob.2008.103. Shibata, Y., Sato, Y., Ogasawara, N., Chiba, G., and Takahata, K. (2009), "A New Ballooned Wireless Mesh Network System for Disaster Use," in Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, AINA '09. doi: 10.1109/AINA.2009.135. Anjum, F., and Mouchtaris, P. (2007). “Security for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks”. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.