An Optimised Gateway Selection Mechanism for Wireless Ad hoc Networks Connected to the Internet

When an ad hoc network is connected to the Internet, it is important for the mobile nodes to detect available gateways providing access to the Internet. We discuss the problem of interworking and integration between the ad hoc and radio access networks. Furthermore, we propose a signalling mechanism to discover and select the optimum gateway when more than one gateway is available. A gateway is considered to be optimum if the path via this gateway provides better quality of service such as total path bandwidth or overall delay. An optimum gateway selection scheme should consider both the ad hoc and radio access networks to provide better QoS support. To achieve this selection, QoS information from both sides of the network needs to be communicated across the network. Further research is required to adapt the proposed mechanism to be applied for wireless sensor networks