Evaluation of ASHFIK as Core-Based Routing Protocol for Critical MANETs Tarek S. Sobh 1 • Ashraf Elgohary 1 • M. Zaki 2 Published online: 26 August 2015 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 Abstract Critical MANET environments such as military battlefields and disaster recovery operations impose a number of requirements (such as the need for robustness and performance within high mobility scenarios), and constraints (hostile attacks, battery limitations, RF range and cost). This work evaluates and contrasts mesh core based multicasting protocols (DCMP, PUMA and ASHFIK). The metrics used in this work include packet delivery ratio and total overhead. In addition, the performance is determined based on number of senders, node mobility and multicast group size. In this paper we found many similarities between the features of critical MANETs and the core based routing protocols and we could conclude that the adaptive secure headship forward induction keeping (ASHFIK) protocol was suitable for most critical MANETs scenarios. Keywords Critical MANET Á Multicasting Á Core based routing protocol Á DCMP Á PUMA Á ASHFIK 1 Introduction A MANET is a collection of wireless nodes (like laptops or PDAs) that can dynamically form a network to exchange information without using any pre-existing fixed network infrastructure. & Tarek S. Sobh tarekbox2000@yahoo.com Ashraf Elgohary ashfik2000@yahoo.com M. Zaki azhar@eun.eg 1 Information Systems Department, Egyptian Armed Forces, Cairo, Egypt 2 Computer and System Engineering Department, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt 123 Wireless Pers Commun (2016) 87:1191–1208 DOI 10.1007/s11277-015-3048-0