International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 18-21, 2004 / Town & Country Resort, San Diego, California / The design of a protocol for a satellite cluster link establishment and management that accounts for link corruption, node failures, and node re-establishment is presented in this paper. This protocol will need to manage the traffic flow between nodes in the satellite cluster, adjust routing tables due to node motion, allow for sub-networks in the cluster, and similar activities. This protocol development is in its initial stages and we will describe how we use the LabVIEW Sate Diagram tool kit to generate the code to design a state machine representing the protocol for the establishment of inter-satellite communications links.

Ad hoc networks have gained significant importance and gathered huge momentum within the wireless network research community. We explore the novel idea of applying ad hoc networking for urban search and rescue operations. Several algorithms have been proposed and implemented for routing in ad hoc networks and their performance have been thoroughly analyzed. But none of the prior work deals specifically for search and rescue operations, which entail certain specific criteria such as prevention of node loss, maximizing the area of coverage and constant and instantaneous access to a main controller. In this thesis, we propose a centralized and adaptive algorithm tailored for efficient performance of mobile nodes assisting in search and rescue operations. The proposed algorithm assists in finding and maintaining stable links between the mobile nodes and base station, while optimizing the area of coverage and energy efficiency of the nodes. The algorithm is implemented using ns (network simulator), and its performance is compared with that of a widely used ad hoc routing protocol, Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol. We use frequency of link breakages, network throughput and routing overhead as our performance metrics. This algorithm can also be extended to provide support for routing among mobile nodes.