Design and implementation of two-tier mobile ad hoc networks with seamless roaming and load-balancing routing capability

Due to its flexibility, mobile ad hoc network (MANET) has attracted a lot of attention recently. Most existing works, however, limit a MANET as a stand-alone network. In this paper, we propose a two-tier MANET by extending the connectivity of the MANET to the Internet. Some hosts in the MANET are equipped with cellular interfaces and are called gateways, which can provide Internet connections. Such extension would greatly improve the connectivity of MANET. To maintain seamless connectivity, we modify the mobile IP to make traversing private networks (i.e., NAT) of cellular networks possible. We also propose a load-balancing routing protocol to utilize the cellular interfaces of gateways, which are likely to be bottlenecks to the Internet. A prototype is implemented and performance results obtained from the testbed is reported.