INTERNET ROUTING ARCHITECTURE

Internet Routing Architecture

Internet Routing Architecture

Introduction

With the development of mobile communications and internet technology, there is a strong need to provide connectivity for roaming devices to communicate continuously with other devices on the internet. However, the mobility of internet hosts is usually within the same broadcast domain where the internet gateway (IGW) is located, referred to as one-hop internet mobility management. Technology advances have taken to the use of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) as the access networks for the internet, where MANETs are used to either cover the empty areas or extend the access networks from one- to multi-hop in the current access technologies such as wireless local area networks (LANs) or cellular networks (Abduljalil and Bodhe, 2007; Le et al., 2006).

Internet Routing Architecture, Challenges and Initiative

Typically, the connection between a MANET node (MN) and an IGW is multi-hop. Therefore, there is normally no direct wireless link from this MN to the IGW. Instead, they are connected via other intermediate nodes. Thus, different problems, e.g. inconsistent context and cascading effect, can happen during the mobility of ad hoc nodes within a MANET domain if multiple IGWs exist (Le-Trung and Kotsis, 2008; Engelstad and Egeland, 2004; Engelstad et al., 2004).

Since, a MANET might be used for both direct communication between MNs and for internet connectivity, it might be useful to make a distinction between the intra-MANET traffic, which is the traffic constrained within a MANET, and the inter-MANET traffic, which is the traffic between the MANET and the internet. (In fact, inter-MANET traffic might also include traffic between two different MANET domains, or between a MANET domain and another type of external network, such as a local wired LAN. However, this paper assumes for simplicity that all inter-MANET traffic is traffic between a MANET and the internet.) Research has been in-progress for the load-balancing (LB) of intra-MANET traffic within a MANET domain (Royer et al., 2001; Chiu and Gen-Huey, 2003), and that of inter-MANET traffic over multiple IGWs (Hsu et al., 2004). However, intra/inter-MANET traffic are considered separately. Moreover, the LB of inter-MANET traffic over multiple IGWs does not consider many realistic problems like inconsistent context problems. In this paper, we want to control together these types of traffic. For this purpose, a hybrid metric for the LB of intra/inter-MANET traffic among multiple IGWs, and alternative solutions to reduce realistic problems in the implementation, are proposed and evaluted through the simulation.

MN location determination is the function that allows a source MN to determine whether a destination node is located within the same MANET domain as the source node or outside the MANET domain (e.g. on an external network, such as an internet host). The function can be implemented by one of the following methods:

All MNs share the same network prefix. With this method, each MN must be assigned a global unicast IP address, both home address (HAddr) and care-of address (CoA), i.e. the MN address is topologically correct (Perkins et ...