Adaptive Mechanisms to Enhance Internet Connectivity for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

There is an on-going effort in the research community to efficiently interconnect mobile ad hoc networks to fixed IP networks. Each of the existing interconnectivity approaches is suited only for a limited range of network conditions and its performance can be degraded by obvious unidirectional links and the broadcast storm during ad hoc nodes discover available Internet gateways. In this paper, an internetworking algorithm with adaptive mechanisms has been proposed to enhance Internet connectivity. First, through exchanging hello packets with additional symmetric neighbor list and asymmetric neighbor list, unidirectional links are removed from route computations and redundant rebroadcasts of broadcast packets are inhibited simultaneously. Then based on the dynamic adjustment of the scope of flooding gateway advertisements as well as the frequency of broadcasting hello packets according to the network conditions change, a lot of unnecessary overheads are avoided. Results using ns-2 simulation show this adaptive Internet connectivity approach can provide better performance than others