Integration of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks into the Internet without Dedicated Gateways

Different mechanisms have been proposed to integrate MANETs into the Internet. Most of them assume the presence of a dedicated entity acting as the Internet Gateway. This characteristic prevents MANET from operating in scenarios prepared for one-hop Wireless LAN where a Gateway is not pre-existing or configured. One possible solution to suppress this restriction is described in the mobile multi-gateway support that transfers the gateway functionalities to a MANET component that is directly connected to the edge router. Due to this transfer, multi-hop ad hoc networks get the flexibility to be integrated into the Internet in scenarios prepared for one-hop WLAN. This paper describes this mechanism and shows its performance by means of simulations.