Network-layer mobility in wireless ad hoc access networks

Abstract: This thesis proposes and discusses solutions to enable network-layer mobility in wireless ad hoc access networks. The deployment of wireless access networks has made them ubiquitous and current research strives to make them pervasive. Users having wireless access to wired IP networks and the Internet are driving the demand for mobile and heterogeneous solutions. To enable all kinds of mobility in heterogeneous All-IP networks there are many issues to be solved. This thesis focuses on network-layer mobility and connectivity of wireless multi-hop ad hoc networks to the Internet. In a wireless environment with overlapping service areas, mobile hosts need to select which gateway(s) to use to access the wireless infrastructure. The signal-to-noise ratio of an access point, which is part of a wireless LAN, does not reflect the number of attached hosts or the traffic between them. The throughput of the access point could be low while the signal is strong. At the same time an access point with weaker signal could allow higher throughput. In ad hoc routing, hop count is the most common metric and the selection of a route to a gateway is affected by the same utilization problem. This could lead to a situation where a short route is used by more hosts and performing worse than a longer route serving fewer hosts. This thesis proposes and discusses solutions to calculating network-layer metrics and using them in gateway selection and handover decisions. To enable connectivity of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) to the Internet, a gateway must support the wired single-hop and wireless multi-hop approaches. To deploy network-layer mobility in a MANET, the Mobile IP protocol needs to be adapted for the multi-hop environment. A MANET enables connectivity to more than one gateway at a time and combined with multihoming it provides seamless handover between subnets. The gateway selection and handover decisions are complicated by the multihoming capabilities. This thesis proposes and discusses solutions to deploying multihomed mobility into MANETs and thereby handling multi-hop gateway discovery, registration of multiple gateways and tunneling to selected gateway(s). Traffic patterns in wired LANs generally follow the 80/20 ratio of Internet destined vs. local traffic. The same traffic patterns generally hold true for wireless hosts. Therefore it is important to maintain the route to the gateway for the Internet destined traffic. This thesis proposes and discusses a solution to maintaining gateway connectivity in MANETs by installing routes to gateways using advertisements. Deciding the locality of a peer and setting up the forwarding route differs between single-hop and multi-hop networks. In single-hop networks a source matches the destination prefix with its own to decide what forwarding policy to use. Local traffic is sent directly to the destination with the link- layer protocol while global traffic is forwarded to a default gateway. In multi-hop networks the ad hoc routing protocol finds the route to a destination either proactively or on-demand. This thesis proposes and discusses a solution to deciding on the mobile host destination locality in a MANET.