Proactive Internet Gateway Discovery Mechanisms for Load-Balanced Internet Connectivity in MANET

摘要

The mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a rapidly configurable multi-hop wireless network without an infrastructure and originally proposed for the military use. In order to make the MANET a more commonly used network in our daily lives, it may be necessary to connect the MANET to the global Internet. A MANET node can communicate with an Internet node via the Internet gateway. To support fault tolerance and increase the bandwidth, multiple Internet gateways can be deployed within a MANET and, in this case, the network performance can be improved by balancing the load among Internet gateways. In this paper, we propose load-balancing Internet gateway discovery mechanisms for the MANET with highly mobile nodes and multiple stationary Internet gateways. Existing mechanisms are analyzed through simulations and, from the simulation results, problems of the existing mechanisms are figured out. Based on the analysis, several enhanced mechanisms are proposed and compared with the existing mechanisms by using the NS-2 simulator.