A two-tier heterogeneous mobile Ad Hoc network architecture and its load-balance routing problem

  • Authors:

  • Chi-Fu Huang;Hung-Wei Lee;Yu-Chee Tseng

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiao-Tung University, Hsin-Chu 30050, Taiwan;Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiao-Tung University, Hsin-Chu 30050, Taiwan;Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiao-Tung University, Hsin-Chu 30050, Taiwan

  • Venue:
  • Mobile Networks and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

The mobile ad hoc network (MANET) has attracted a lot of interest recently. However, most of the existing works have assumed a stand-alone MANET. In this paper, we propose a two-tier, heterogeneous MANET architecture which can support Internet access. The low tier of the network consists of a set of mobile hosts each equipped with a IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN card. In order to connect to the Internet and handle the network partitioning problem, we propose that the high tier is comprised of a subset of the mobile hosts, called gateways, which can access to cellular/infrastructure networks. The high tier is heterogeneous in the sense that the network interfaces in the gateway hosts could be IEEE 802.11 cards, PHS handsets, or GPRS handsets characterized by different bandwidths and latencies. Observing that the gateways could become the bottlenecks of the two-tier network, we propose a set of solutions, namely boundary-moving, host-partitioning, and probabilistic solutions, to solve the load-balance routing issue. Implementation issues/concerns of these schemes are discussed. Simulation results are presented to compare these load-balance routing schemes.