Design of Multi-Hop Handovers for Hybrid Ad Hoc Networks in Multi-Channel Environments

To provide Internet connectivity to mobile ad hoc networks, several solutions have been proposed. Most of the proposals focus on the suitable and optimal gateway selection and handover schemes in accordance with the network status and node mobility. However, since an integration of the Internet and ad hoc networks is a function of the network layer, they do not consider characteristics of lower layers such as a multichannel capability. If the operating channels of each gateway are different, mobile nodes connecting to one gateway cannot receive any messages from other gateways, and thus they cannot perform handovers to other gateways. In this paper, we propose a new handover scheme for hybrid ad hoc networks in multi-channel environments. We revise and extend the previously proposed handover schemes namely the forced handover and optimized handover. We also studied the performance of the proposed two schemes through ns-2 simulations.