Multihop Mobile Wireless Internet Access: The Combined Use of Gateway Mobility and Mobile IP's Simultaneous Binding Capability

摘要

Because of their orthogonal architectures, the integration of the Internet and mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) into a unified, hybrid network is a challenging problem. The goal of the integration is to provide MANET nodes, which could be multihop wireless away from mobile Internet protocol (MIP) foreign agents, with wireless Internet access. This could be achieved through the introduction of an entity with hybrid mechanism, which will incorporate the appropriate functionality of MIP and an ad hoc routing protocol to connect to both networks and make their interaction happen. The efficiency of the multihop wireless Internet access provided to MANET nodes strongly depends on the design properties of the introduced entity and its working scheme. The purpose of this paper is to propose a hierarchical architecture that aims at providing continuous wireless Internet access to MANET nodes while moving multiple wireless hops away from MIP foreign agents, which are located at the edge of the Internet and act as access points to the Internet. More specifically, the proposed architecture utilizes mobile gateways along with MIP's simultaneous binding property, which authorizes mobile gateways to register with more than one MIP foreign agent simultaneously when they are located within their overlapping coverage areas. The MIP's simultaneous binding feature creates higher reliability and decreases the number of registrations that would be needed when a mobile gateway is moving rapidly across overlapping coverage areas of multiple MIP foreign agents.