Adaptive Distributed Gateway Discovery in Hybrid Wireless Networks

An ever-growing demand for coverage extension, higher data-rates and improved connectivity has motivated the interconnection of mobile ad-hoc networks to fixed IP networks, to form a Hybrid Wireless Network (HWN). The convergence of ad- hoc and infrastructure network is also attractive in real-world scenarios due to its practicality and usefulness. In HWNs, gateways are generally used as an interconnection point for the integrated network. In order to improve the overall performance of HWN, an efficient gateway discovery and route maintenance scheme is indispensable. In this paper, we present a novel adaptive gateway discovery scheme called ADD (Adaptive Distributed gateway Discovery), in which the adaptation is done in a fully distributed manner. Simulation results show that the distributed adaptation capabilities of our proposed scheme facilitate outperforming the existing gateway discovery mechanisms in terms of control overhead, packet delivery and delay.