An Improved Scheme for the Integration of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks into the Internet without Dedicated Gateways

Most of the proposed mechanisms that integrate MANETs into the Internet utilize a dedicated entity acting as the Internet Gateway. This demand prevents MANET from operating in scenarios prepared for one-hop wireless LAN where a Gateway is not pre-installed. One possible solution is described in the mobile multi-gateway support that temporally transfers the gateway functionalities to a component of the MANET residing in the coverage area of the access router. Since no mobility restriction is imposed on the terminal acting as the Internet Gateway, a self-configuring technique must be applied to sequentially configure the successive terminals that play the role of the Gateway. However, this distributed algorithm shows a main drawback as the switching of the gateway functionalities between the nodes provokes the existence of periods where no Internet gateway is configured, i.e. where the MANET remains isolated and thus, the network performance degrades. In order to reduce these intervals a new technique has been developed. By means of simulations, the benefits of the modified mechanism compared to the normal procedure have been demonstrated