Multi-Hop Cellular IP: A New Approach to Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

This paper proposes a new Heterogeneous Multi‐hop Cellular IP (MCIP) network that integrates multi‐hop communication with Cellular IP. MCIP increases the coverage of the wireless network and improves the network robustness against adverse propagation phenomena by supporting communication in dead zones and areas with poor radio coverage. MCIP includes three components: location management, connection management and route reconfiguration. Location management is responsible for maintaining the location information for Mobile Stations (MSs) in a local domain. Connection management establishes an initial path for data transmission and a route reconfiguration mechanism is proposed to take advantage of various multi‐hop connection alternatives available based on terminal interfaces, network accessibility and topology. Our simulation results show that MCIP performs well in networks of various sizes including scalability, throughput, and packet delay.