Review Strategies and Analysis of Mobile Ad Hoc Network- Internet Integration Solutions

The desire to be connected anytime and anywhere has led to the development of wireless networks, opening new vista of research in pervasive and ubiquitous computing. Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) use portable devices such as mobile phones, laptops or personal digital assistants (PDAs) for spontaneous establishment of communication. Most existing research in the area of mobile Ad Hoc Networks is limited to stand-alone isolated networks. But connectivity of a mobile Ad Hoc network to the Internet is also desirable as more and more applications and services in our society now depend on fixed infrastructure networks. It is therefore important that dynamically deployed wireless Ad Hoc networks should also gain access to these fixed networks and their services. The integration of MANETs into Internet increases the networking flexibility and coverage of existing infrastructure networks. Although researchers have proposed many solutions, but it is still unclear which one offer the best performance compared to the others. When an Ad Hoc network is connected to Internet, it is important for the mobile nodes to detect efficiently available Internet gateways providing access to the Internet. Internet gateway discovery time and handover delay have strong influence on packet delay and throughput. The key challenge in providing connectivity is to minimize the overhead of mobile IP and Ad Hoc routing protocol between Internet and Ad Hoc networks. There, this paper focuses on proposed technical solutions on Internet gateway discovery and also we briefly describe different ways to provide global Internet access for MANETs. Finally, some challenges are also mentioned which need in depth investigation.