Mobility Management for Global IP Connectivity of MANET in Emergency Situations

Emergency situations are one of the main potential commercial applications of mobile ad hoc network (MANET). These situations propose three requirements to the network: fast deployment, automatic formation and Internet connection. To fulfill the first and the second requirements, the hosts in the MANET may obtain network configurations by auto-configuration. When the MANET connects to the Internet, Mobile IP is the first choice of mobility management. But the assumptions made in Mobile IP conflict with the requirements presented in emergency situations. The first assumption is that each node has been assigned a static and unique Home Address. The second is that the Home Agent has been deployed and maintained usable. This paper presents a new solution to mobility management in the MANET where dynamic DNS update is used for mobile host location and Migrate is used for mobile handoff support. As a result, the nodes in emergency situations can form a MANET automatically and move between different gateways without prerequisites.