A Layer-2 Framework for Interconnecting Ad Hoc Networks to Fixed Internet: Test-bed Implementation and Experimental Evaluation

It is widely recognized that a prerequisite for the commercial penetration of the ad hoc networking technologies is the integration with existing wired/wireless infrastructure-based networks to provide an easy and transparent access to the Internet and its services. However, most of the existing solutions for enabling the interconnection between IPv4-based mobile ad hoc networks and the Internet are based on complex and inefficient mechanisms, as Mobile-IP and IP tunnelling. In this paper, we describe an alternative approach to build multi-hop and heterogeneous proactive ad hoc networks, which can be used as flexible and low-cost extensions of traditional wired local area networks (LANs). Our proposed architecture provides transparent global Internet connectivity and address autoconfiguration capabilities to mobile nodes without requiring configuration changes in the pre-existing wired LAN, and relying on basic layer-2 functionalities. We have prototyped the core components of this architecture for Optimized Link State Routing-based ad hoc networks and we have conducted several experiments comparing the throughput performance obtained using our scheme and a well-known alternative (network address translation) NAT-based solution. The experimental outcomes show that our proposed technique ensures higher perconnection throughputs than the NAT-based solution in the considered network scenarios.