Design and Performance Evaluation of a Novel Architecture to the Integration of the Internet and Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

摘要

While the Internet is a wireless, infrastructured network that supports one-hop mobile communication, mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) have no infrastructure and enable multi-hop communication between mobile nodes. Moreover, mobility management in the Internet has been taken care of by Mobile IP, while mobility in mobile ad hoc networks is handled by ad hoc routing protocols. Due to these network architectural mismatches, the integration of the Internet and mobile wireless ad hoc networks is a challenging problem that needs to be approached in order to overcome these mismatches and unify the Internet and MANET into an integrated network, where interactions between MANET nodes and the Internet can take place smoothly. The purpose of this paper is to propose three-layer architecture based on mobile gateways and using Mobile IP protocol and dynamic destination-sequenced distance vector (DSDV) ad hoc routing protocol. Mobile gateways are introduced to add more accessibility of Mobile IP foreign agents to MANET nodes by widening their coverage ranges. Moreover, the proposed architecture has relevant properties, such as access and migration transparency, scalability, and availability. The results of a number of simulations that were conducted using ns2, have shown that the use of mobile gateways is a useful solution to providing MANET nodes with Internet connectivity.