An AODV Based Gateway Discovery Mechanism for Ad-Hoc Network and Internet Integration

A stand-alone Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is very useful because of its communication capability in the rapidly changing and dynamic environment without any infrastructure. If such a readily deployable network is connected to the Internet, ubiquitous Internet access is possible. The Integration of Internet and MANET exhibit difference in their network architecture. Thus, the interconnection is achieved by using Gateways (GW), which acts as bridges between MANET and Internet. This Gateway node must be firstly discovered by MANET nodes in order to get connectivity to Internet Nodes. This discovery can be done by one of three approaches, namely Proactive, Reactive and Hybrid. The MANET routing protocol, Ad Hoc on Demand Distance Vector routing protocol (AODV) was modified to support MANET nodes to communicate with fixed device in the Internet. Thus this paper focuses on applying extended AODV with Reactive, Proactive and Hybrid approach to the problem of connecting MANET to Internet. For the purpose of simulation Network Simulator 2 (NS2), version 2.33 is used. It is shown that Proactive and Reactive approaches work better in different Simulation environments.