Performance analysis of Internet gateway discovery protocols in ad hoc networks

When an ad hoc network is connected to the Internet, it is important for the mobile nodes to detect the available gateways providing access to the Internet. Therefore, a gateway discovery mechanism is required. The two main approaches for discovering Internet gateways are the reactive and the proactive one. This paper compares the performance of these approaches in various scenarios by means of simulation. We show that the proactive approach performs better in the simulated scenario.