Aiding the efficient collaboration and coordination of rescue teams is a difficult task especially in a mountainous region. Challenges emerge from quickly alerting and debriefing rescuers, to deploying them effectively, and also coordinating and monitoring them in the rural search domain. Knowing the exact location of the rescuers and vehicles involved in a mountain search and rescue mission is a key element for the successful progress of the mission and aids the mission coordinator, who usually stays at the headquarters, to take fast and informed decisions. In this paper we present the devised Location Awareness Rescue System that targets the aforementioned challenges, and provides location information and updates of the rescuers in a real time manner as they are deployed in the rescue domain overlaid onto interactive maps. The results from our tests show that our system is a proficient presence management solution that can provide precise location information by recovering from any periodic or total connectivity loss, and also improve and support mountain rescue teams leading to more effective and successful missions.

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) routing protocols have been the focus of an accomplished research effort for many years within the networking community and now the results of this effort are beginning to show. With protocol development maturing (and now typically concentrating on a smaller number of standardised routing protocols), increasing numbers of deployment successes are materialising. However, despite these successes and the relative stability of the protocol implementations, seamlessly incorporating MANETs into the Internet still presents many challenges that have hindered their deployment in important mobile scenarios. In this paper we discuss the inherent properties that have affected the adoption of MANET solutions and present an innovative new protocol which has been designed to comprehensively address these challenges. Using performance results acquired from our experimental testbed, we demonstrate how our approach can be used to produce MANET solutions that are highly suited to use in synergy with the current Internet architecture. Our protocol is based on the concept of integrating MANET routing protocols with network mobility (NEMO) technologies to produce what is termed a MANEMO solution. This has meant that by utilising the properties of both of these technologies we have been able to realise a solution that provides mobile networks with the efficient localised communication and robustness of MANETs, as well as the global reachability and the ability to provide structured AAA that a NEMO approach can support.

The NEMO basic support protocol is a home agent based technique (derived from mobile IPv6) that permits the mobility of a network of IPv6 devices to be supported through the use of a dedicated mobile router. This NEMO mobile router accepts connections from IPv6 nodes and transparently manages any IP mobility on their behalf, which means that as well as individual hosts, a NEMO mobile router can also accept connections from other NEMO mobile networks. When this occurs, the inter-connected NEMO mobile networks form a highly inefficient topology known as a nested NEMO network. In this paper we describe this concept and examine the properties of nested NEMO networks. In particular we highlight how their communication patterns differ from typical mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) and present example scenarios which demonstrate their potential application domain. We present the unified MANEMO architecture (UMA), a solution which has been developed in order to efficiently support these nested NEMO scenarios. Through varying experimental testbed configurations, we provide an evaluation of the protocols performance and demonstrate how our approach is able to be deployed over the current Internet architecture without requiring any augmentation to access networks or the core Internet infrastructure.