Enhancing the Performance of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks with the Aid of Internet Gateways 1

Abstract- Mobile ad hoc networks allow mobile nodes to communicate with one another without the aid of infrastructure thus forming temporary networks on the fly. While such networks are gaining immense popularity, they are prone to scalability issues when the network size (number of nodes) increases, causing the path length between the source and destination to increase linearly. Hence a large number of intermediate nodes are burdened with the forwarding load imposed by other mobile nodes, drastically affecting the performance of ad hoc networks. In this paper, a technique to enhance the performance of MANETs is implemented based on existing infrastructure, which is originally to provide Internet access to MANET nodes resulting in infrastructured MANET. The base stations not only play as gateways to Internet but also serve as intermediate nodes between MANET nodes, thus taking responsibility of relaying most of the burden (packets) imposed by the mobile nodes in the network. Our simulation focuses on assessing performance gains with the introduction of the proposed gateways. I