On Gateway Selection Protocol for DYMO-Based MANET

The coupling of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) and the Internet is gaining attention by researchers working towards future ubiquitous computing environments. In this work, we focus on the situation that occurs when specialized, sensitive data are sent to the Internet from MANET nodes. These special data types are especially susceptible to security risks such as information leak and data falsification. Therefore, it is necessary for such special data to be forwarded by a secure/trusted gateway which is under control of a trusted network administrator. However, we assume there can be multiple gateways deployed in a MANET, where the cost ineffectiveness makes it difficult for a network administrator to simultaneously manage every gateway. Because of the risk of forwarding special data through an unmaintained gateway, we propose a routing protocol which allows a source node to have all data forwarded to the Internet through a trusted gateway. To achieve desirable performance, we improve upon one of the newest routing protocols, Dynamic MANET On-demand (DYMO). Through simulations, we evaluated our proposal in comparison with the conventional DYMO protocol. The results show that our proposal achieves performance allowing MANET source nodes to choose gateways for specific data.