Overhead reduction of location-aided gateway discovery protocols

Integration of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) into infrastructure-based networks allows mobile users to access other networks. At a network boundary, some node with multiple interfaces plays an important role as a gateway. Gateway discovery mechanism is necessary for mobile nodes to discover nearby gateways but causes message exchange overhead. In order to control the overhead, we present a novel location-aided gateway discovery protocol with directional broadcast algorithm and Solicitation technique. Simulation results show that our proposed protocol can reduce the overhead, as compared to conventional protocols. Moreover, it improves packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and gateway discovery time.