Multi hop communication in global wireless framework

Mobile ad-hoc networks are infrastructure-free highly dynamic wireless networks, where central administration or configuration by the user is impractical. This paper highlights the questions of allowing all the wireless ad hoc devices to use the same network address in a global wireless framework. It presents the paradigm of using auto-assigned, private non-internet-routable IP addresses as the basis to provide anytime, anywhere services to nomadic end users in the information space. It follows on from our work on integrating personal mobility services architectures and interoperating wireless networked appliances. Providing a multi-hop communication over a series of user's devices each acting as a multi-port MAC bridge constructs an interoperable, interworking domain allowing applications to run seamlessly in the upper layers. We discuss the case of the IEEE 802.11 protocol specification where we present working scenarios and protocols used to initialise and maintain the operation of its multi-hop communications. It is an attempt to provide a better range of services in an interoperable heterogeneous domain to offering the services from both the network side and the local environment by means of multi-hop ad-hoc MAC bridges.