Study on the need for adaptive gateway discovery in MANETs

The integration of MANET into external networks is achieved by Internet Gateways. These Gateways are responsible for propagating the information necessary to make mobile nodes autoconfigure. This information can be generated on demand (reactively), periodically (proactively) or in a hybrid way. When a hybrid gateway discovery is used, the Gateway periodically generates MRA messages each interval of time TMRA. In opposition to the proactive schemes, the messages are propagated in a restricted area close to the Gateway. The area is defined by the number of hops that these messages are broadcast (the TTL value). The optimum value for TMRA and TTL depends on the network conditions such as the network load, the position of sources, etc. In this work, we analyze the benefits of dynamically adjusting the interval of emission of the MRA messages in a hybrid gateway discovery.