Performance Analysis of Tunneling Protocols used in a Mobile Network with Mobile Router

A mobile router, which is in an ad-hoc network is not only a general ad-hoc network entity, but also an anchor node, which takes role of an access point to make a flat network environment into a hierarchical one. Thus, a mobile router must have both ad-hoc routing protocol and a mechanism to communicate with the infrastructure. The role of a mobile router is similar to the one of a mesh router in a wireless mesh network. From the point of view of an infrastructure, a mobile network represented by mobile router is identified as a node. Even when the mobile network moves while changing its point of attachment to the infrastructure, the mobile router should continuously transmit packets to the nodes in the network. But, the existing tunneling protocol derived from IP-in-IP encapsulation of Mobile IPv4 to send packets to the nodes of the mobile network causes an additive delay and an IP header overhead. In this paper, we propose two tunneling protocols and two location registration methods. We compare the performance of the proposed schemes against legacy ones. Our simulation results indicate that the new schemes improve network performance with respect of delay, link recovery time and packet delivery rate