Gateway pheromone-based adaptive internet access scheme for mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Control messages produced in the gateway discovery process degrade the performance of hybrid mobile ad hoc networks. Thus, the optimisation is required to release resources for the data transmissions. This paper proposes a novel adaptive gateway discovery scheme to improve the performance. In the scheme, active regions, which are delineated by gateway pheromone, are defined to optimise the propagation of control messages. To adapt to dynamic network topology, active regions are adjusted periodically to keep their availability by adaptive maintenance operations. Moreover, a link robustness evaluation model based on signal strength is integrated into the scheme to help build stable routes. Therefore, the control overhead can be further reduced because the messages generated due to the link breakages can be avoided. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in different scenarios. The results show that our scheme outperforms the existing gateway discovery mechanisms especially in terms of control overhead reduction.