An Adaptive Gateway Discovery Algorithm to support QoS When Providing Internet Access to Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

When a node in an ad hoc network wants Internet access, it needs to obtain information about the available gateways and it should select the most appropriate of them. In this work we propose a new gateway discovery scheme suitable for real-time applications that adjusts the frequency of gateway advertisements dynamically. This adjustment is related to the percentage of real-time sources that have quality of service problems because of excessive end-to-end delays. The optimal values for the configuration parameters (time interval and threshold) of the proposed adaptive gateway discovery mechanism for the selected network conditions have been studied with the aid of simulations. The scalability of the proposed scheme with respect to mobility as well as the impact of best-effort traffic load have been analyzed. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme significantly improves the average end-to-end delay, jitter and packet delivery ratio of real-time flows; the routing overhead is also reduced and there is no starvation of best-effort traffic.