Mobility management in hybrid ad-hoc networks and the Internet environment

The integration of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) with the Internet provides flexible and multi-hop communication capability in hybrid wired and wireless networks. Existing architectures for integrating these networks use Mobile IP and ad-hoc routing protocols with fixed gateways. In this paper, we propose a mobility management scheme based on a mobile gateways (MGs) architecture. We designed a buffering mechanism for micro- and macro-mobility management in hybrid networks. The performance of mobility management with optimized handover (MM-OH), optimized handover with prediction (MM-OHP) and forced handover (MM-FH) are evaluated using simulation. Our simulation results show that a buffering mechanism coupled with the hybrid gateway discovery results in a higher packet delivery ratio for MM-OH and MM-OHP compared with the MM-FH scheme. The MM-OHP scheme has a lower number of handovers compared with the MM-OH scheme. Moreover, the simulation experiments reveal that the speed of the MG has a relatively higher impact on performance than the speed of mobile nodes. Copyright (C) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.