  The nature of Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) makes them suitable to be
utilized in the context of an extreme emergency for all involved rescue teams.
We use the term emergency MANETs (eMANETs) in order to describe next generation
IP-based networks, which are deployed in emergency cases such as forest fires
and terrorist attacks. The main goal within the realm of eMANETs is to provide
emergency workers with intelligent devices such as smart phones and PDAs. This
technology allows communication "islets" to be established between the members
of the same or different emergency teams (policemen, firemen, paramedics). In
this article, we discuss an adaptive and secure routing protocol developed for
the purposes of eMANETs. We evaluate the performance of the protocol by
comparing it with other widely used routing protocols for MANETs. We finally
show that the overhead introduced due to security considerations is affordable
to support secure ad-hoc communications among lightweight devices.
