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This document proposes a reactive mobile IP handoff mechanism for mobile ad hoc networks with multiple internet gateways. It designs an enhanced mobile IP protocol called the mobile IP registration controller that is suitable for the MANET environment. A key contribution is the adaptive mobile IP handoff triggering mechanism that is assisted by the dynamic source routing route maintenance mechanism. Simulation results support the idea of using routing information and traffic conditions to facilitate fast and seamless handoffs between gateways in the mobile ad hoc network.
This document proposes a reactive mobile IP handoff mechanism for mobile ad hoc networks with multiple internet gateways. It designs an enhanced mobile IP protocol called the mobile IP registration controller that is suitable for the MANET environment. A key contribution is the adaptive mobile IP handoff triggering mechanism that is assisted by the dynamic source routing route maintenance mechanism. Simulation results support the idea of using routing information and traffic conditions to facilitate fast and seamless handoffs between gateways in the mobile ad hoc network.
This document proposes a reactive mobile IP handoff mechanism for mobile ad hoc networks with multiple internet gateways. It designs an enhanced mobile IP protocol called the mobile IP registration controller that is suitable for the MANET environment. A key contribution is the adaptive mobile IP handoff triggering mechanism that is assisted by the dynamic source routing route maintenance mechanism. Simulation results support the idea of using routing information and traffic conditions to facilitate fast and seamless handoffs between gateways in the mobile ad hoc network.
Revised on 1st September 2008 doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2008.0275 In Special Issue on Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks ISSN 1751-8628 Mobile IP handoffs among multiple internet gateways in mobile ad hoc networks S. Ding Institute for Telecommunication Research, University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes, SA, Australia E-mail: shuo.ding.australia@gmail.com Abstract: In a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) with multiple Internet gateways, efcient management of mobile IP functionality supporting seamless data services is a major challenge. The inadequacy of existing mobile IP schemes applicable to MANETs motivated the search for more efcient gateway discovery/handoff schemes. A solution for mobile IP-based gateway discovery/handoff in dynamic source routing (DSR)-based MANET is formulated. Enhanced mobile IP protocol suitable for MANET environment, i.e. the mobile IP registration controller, is designed. In particular, one of the most signicant contributions deals with the mobile IP handoff triggering mechanism which is adaptively assisted by the DSR route maintenance mechanism. Simulation results are provided to support the idea. 1 Introduction Fourth-Generation (4G) wireless communication systems aim at integrating heterogeneous networks seamlessly, to satisfy users increasing demands in terms of bandwidth and coverage [1]. Recently, multi-hop techniques have been envisioned as an important component of 4G wireless networks, in which end user terminals can communicate with the wired infrastructure backbone via the multi-hop relays of ad hoc nodes. Thus 4G systems will become convergence platforms with widespread coverage available by the integration of multi-hop capability. Moreover, IP mobility [2] may be available in such 4G convergence systems, to serve the needs of globally mobile users to maintain uninterrupted connectivity when roaming to different domains, including the mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) domain. With respect to the interesting scenario of connecting stand-alone MANETs with the Internet, if mobile nodes roam between MANETs and the Internet, IP mobility operations are required to maintain uninterrupted connectivity. According to the mobility detection mechanisms provided by standard mobile IP protocol, such as lazy cell switching (LCS), prex matching (PM) and eager cell switching (ECS) [3], a mobile node is capable of detecting whether it has roamed to a new network via one- hop link connectivity. However, in a MANET environment, a mobile node cannot detect the location of a gateway by the reception of an agent advertisement, because the agent advertisement broadcast by the gateway may be relayed via multiple hops. Thus, the traditional mechanisms of mobility detection provided by mobile IP are unsuitable to the MANET scenario. Thus far, most existing schemes [411] adopted proactive gateway discovery, by which a gateway broadcasts advertisements with xed advertising interval, and the ad hoc nodes rebroadcast the advertisements ooding the entire MANET. So if multiple gateways broadcast, the ooding overhead is very signicant. Also, these researches did not consider the issue of routing information piggybacking on advertisements. As a result, duplicate route discovery must be executed, and further, bandwidth resources are wasted. Furthermore, in a highly dynamic MANET where mobile nodes frequently change their locations, a mobile node is desired to select an optimal gateway if multiple gateways exist, in order to achieve better services. Thus, mobile IP handoffs among multiple gateways in MANET become challenging. In previous work, a MIP-MANET cell switching (MMCS) [6, 7] mechanism was proposed, which is a proactive, timer-driven handoff approach. A mobile node passively performs handoffs relying on the receptions of periodic agent advertisements. The proactive handoff 752 IET Commun., 2009, Vol. 3, Iss. 5, pp. 752763 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009 doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2008.0275 www.ietdl.org mechanisms have a limitation: the handoffs are not adaptive to the dynamic network topology and trafc conditions. Therefore the reactive gateway handoff mechanism would be a promising solution, which means that a mobile node is allowed to reactively discover a gateway when necessary. The prompt trigger and low overhead would be the major interests. In order to avoid severe communication gap on handoff, the mobile node can promptly discover a new gateway as soon as it detects that it has lost connectivity with its registered gateway. In response to the solicitation, a gateway may unicast an advertisement to the mobile node, which will signicantly decrease routing overheads. Thus far, there still remains a largely unexplored research area in the reactive gateway handoffs in MANET. The main challenge concerns the efcient design of handoff triggers and criteria that can optimise the handoff performance, e.g. lower delay and lower packet loss rate caused by the handoff procedure. This paper contributes an adaptive and intelligent gateway handoff mechanism designed for the MANET based on multi-hop communications. A reactive handoff triggering scheme, in which mobile IP may utilise dynamic source routing (DSR) [12] routing information and trafc condition to facilitate fast and seamless handoff services, is designed. The system is assumed to be an All-IP network transparent to the physical layers comprising heterogeneous technologies, so the information from MAC layer will not be used to assist the handoff procedures. The paper is organised as follows: Section 2 introduces mobile IP preliminary. Section 3 describes the system architecture. Section 4 outlines the mobile IP registration controller in MANET environment. Section 5 designs the reactive gateway handoff mechanism. Section 6 briey presents the proactive gateway handoff mechanism. Simulation results are provided in Section 7. Conclusions are drawn in Section 8. 2 Mobile IP preliminary Mobile IP users can seamlessly roam among IP networks without changing their home IP addresses. As shown in Figs. 1 and 2, the basic mobile IP operations include Agent Discovery, Registration and Tunneling. The Agent Discovery is the method by which a mobile node (MN) checks the received agent advertisements via one-hop link to detect its current location on home or foreign network. When the MN moves to a foreign network, it can obtain a Care-of address (CoA) from a foreign agents (FA) agent advertisement and create a registration request to its HA. The HA sends a registration reply to the MN via the FA. After a successful registration, the HA maintains reachability information for the MN in the foreign network. All datagrams destined to the MNs home address will be tunneled to the MNs CoA by the HA [3]. The procedure by which a MN disassociates with an old FA and associates with a new FA is called Handoff. In mobile IP protocol, three network-layer handoff mechanisms were dened [3]. LCS depends on the lifetime eld in an advertisement; PM depends on the prex- lengths extension in an advertisement; ECS involves immediate gateway handoff on receiving a new CoA. These mechanisms are all based on the assumption that the MN and its HA/FA communicate via one-hop link. 3 System architecture The proposed network architecture of an infrastructure- integrated MANET is shown in Fig. 3. The following elements are comprised: ad hoc nodes; Internet gateways (FA/HA); correspondent nodes. Within the MANET, multiple gateways may advertise their presence periodically (proactive approach) or on-demand (reactive approach). Each ad hoc node has a globally unique identication associated with its HA. Figs. 4a and 4b illustrate the protocol stacks on the gateway and ad hoc node, respectively. The functions of these protocol modules are described as follows: Enhanced IP routing: The traditional IP routing algorithm is enhanced. IP Packet Destination Computing (IPDC) is the main entry for processing IP packets in MANET/mobile IP integration system; IP Packet Forwarding (IPF) module may handle the IP-in-IP tunneling and detunneling operations. Figure 1 Mobile IP agent discovery and registration operation Figure 2 Mobile IP packet tunneling operation IET Commun., 2009, Vol. 3, Iss. 5, pp. 752763 753 doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2008.0275 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009 www.ietdl.org Mobile IP: The Registration module works at the application layer, using UDP as the transport protocol, to generate/process registration request/reply. The ICMP advertising and soliciting module works at the IP layer, for generating/processing agent advertisement and solicitation. Ad hoc routing: DSR is extended to support the Internet routing and mobile IP. DSR is mature and well dened ad hoc reactive routing protocol, which represents typical features of almost all reactive routing protocols. 4 Mobile IP registration controller for MANETs The mobile IP registration controller (MIPRC) is an enhanced mobile IP protocol that controls mobile IP registrations in response to events in MANETs, e.g. the received mobile IP signalling messages, timers and registration/handoff triggers. 4.1 Mobile host MIPRC 4.1.1 State transition diagram: The state transition diagram of MIPRC for mobile node is shown in Fig. 5. On each transit line, Event Action is illustrated. The controller has four idle states as suggested in [13]. The Lost state means the node is not registered with any agent; the Foreign state means the node is currently registered with a foreign agent, FA_Current; the Pending Registration state means the node is waiting for a registration reply from a pending agent, FA_Pending; the Home state means the node is on its home network. The candidate agent address contained in a newly incoming advertisement is denoted as FA_New. 4.1.2 Mobile IP advertisement cache: If the MIPRC is used for infrastructure networks, on receiving a new advertisement, a mobile node in Foreign must immediately register with that FA, as it assumes it has entered a new foreign network. However, in MANET case, the reception of an advertisement should not become the triggering event for gateway handoff, as each node may inevitably overhear advertisements from multiple gateways. Figure 4 Protocol architecture a Gateway b Mobile host Figure 3 Network architecture 754 IET Commun., 2009, Vol. 3, Iss. 5, pp. 752763 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009 doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2008.0275 www.ietdl.org Hence, a hash table, mobile IP advertisement cache (MIPAC), is designed to manage the advertising information of multiple gateways in MANET environment. Newly incoming advertisements will rstly be buffered in order of arrival, before they can be used for agent registrations. 4.1.3 Registration algorithm: As shown in Fig. 5, in the Lost state, the node will try to register with a gateway using the rst incoming advertisement by immediately sending a registration request. Next, the node waits for a valid registration reply at its Pending Registration state. If the Pending Timer expires, a registration request will be retransmitted. The change to Foreign means the registration has ofcially completed. Otherwise, the node goes to Lost if the valid registration reply is not received. 4.1.4 Handoff interrupt and trigger: MANET routing assists the handoffs. After receiving a new advertisement, MIPRC will buffer it in the MIPAC and originate a handoff interrupt to MANET module. The handoff interrupt contains elds of current agent address, candidate agent address and handoff enquiry code. On receiving the handoff interrupt, MANET module will compare the latest routing information of the two agents. In Foreign state, FA_Current and FA_New will be compared; in Pending Registration state, FA_Pending and FA_New will be compared. The handoff evaluation and triggering mechanism implemented by MANET module will be explained in Section 5. 4.1.5 Agent interrupt holding time table: This table is used to avoid frequent pingpong handoffs to the same FA in a short period of time [13]. A mobile node will cancel a registration attempt if it nds the previous registration with a gateway is still within the holding time. 4.2 Foreign agent MIPRC Fig. 6 illustrates the state transition diagram of the MIPRC on FA (or HA) [13]. FAHA listens to events in its Idle state. An enhancement is that a solicitation interrupt will force the FAHA to unicast an advertisement to the initiator. Other functionalities follow the mobile IP standard, including: timer for broadcasting, registration messages relays between HA and FA, IP-in-IP tunneling/ detunneling, destroy of any overheard advertisement, etc. 5 Reactive gateway handoff mechanism The reactive gateway handoff mechanism strongly depends on the route maintenance of specic ad hoc routing protocol. DSR route maintenance mechanism will be demonstrated as an example. 5.1 Soliciting advertisements The trigger for actively soliciting advertisements (reactive gateway discovery) is: only these mobile nodes (initiators) that intend to send packets to unknown destinations (possibly on the Internet) can discover gateways reactively. The RREQs sent by initiators will be treated as the solicitations for the unicast advertisements from gateways. Simultaneously, gateways and the initiator may still implement external route discovery algorithm. This scheme is advantageous in fast, prompt trigger and signicantly low overhead, which is a Figure 5 MIPRC for mobile nodes Figure 6 MIPRC for gateways IET Commun., 2009, Vol. 3, Iss. 5, pp. 752763 755 doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2008.0275 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009 www.ietdl.org novel contribution of this paper. First, redundant mobile IP registrations and ooding advertisements involving the entire MANET can be avoided. Second, soliciting advertisements is combined with the external route discovery, so that the delay and overhead due to separate soliciting can be avoided. On receiving the rst advertisement, the initiator will try to register with that gateway as an initial gateway, in order to change its state from Lost to Foreign. Then, the initiator may evaluate incoming multiple advertisements for gateway handoffs. Meanwhile, reactive external route construction (RERC) algorithm is adopted for external route discovery. A user-dened parameter, external route discovery time, is congured on the initiator, to discriminate whether the destination in RREQ is on the Internet or not. The details of the RERC are beyond of the scope of this paper. 5.2 Propagating MIP signalling messages Mobile IP layer is transparent to the propagation of mobile IP signalling messages. DSR is responsible for propagating advertisement, registration request and reply via selected source routes. An example of unicasting Advertisement is shown in Fig. 7. On a gateway, a source route option (SRO) is inserted into the advertisement packet; the TTL eld in the advertisements IP header is set to the network dimension (hops, a user-dened parameter). Only on the destination of a signalling message, the standard signalling message will be passed to MIPRC. The intermediate nodes along the source route (SR) will just update the source routing information. 5.3 Reactive handoff phases The reactive gateway handoff may include three phases as follows: Handoff solicitation triggering phase: This is the key phase in the reactive gateway handoff scheme. A mobile node may be triggered to send solicitation, when it detects that the unavailability of the routes towards its current gateway has blocked the packet delivery to the Internet. Handoff evaluation phase: On receiving multiple advertisements from multiple gateways, the mobile node evaluates the gateways services according to predened criteria. Handoff phase: Once the mobile node selects a better gateway other than its current gateway to register with, it proceeds with a mobile IP handoff procedure by sending a registration request and receiving a registration reply. 5.4 Handoff solicitation triggers 5.4.1 Overview: To understand the handoff solicitation trigger principle, rst we briey describe the route maintenance mechanism in standard DSR protocol. When generating or forwarding a data packet with a SRO, a node is responsible for conrming the reachability of its next hop, by sending an ACK_REQ and receiving ACK. The node temporarily buffers a copy of the packet in the maintenance buffer, in case of retransmissions to the next hop when necessary. If the node fails to receive an ACK from the next hop after the maximum-allowed retransmissions have been reached, it will assume that the next hop is unreachable. The node handling the data packet may be one of the following types: Source node: The data packet being handled is generated by this node. The node IP address is the data packets source address. Intermediate node: The node is one of the intermediate hops contained in the address list in the data packets SRO. If a node (denoted as triggering node) detects its unreachable next-hop node using the above route maintenance mechanism, it will rst delete all source routes containing the unreachable next-hop node from the route cache. Subsequently, the triggering node will perform an appropriate handoff solicitation trigger algorithm, respectively, depending on which type the triggering node is, source node or intermediate node. In fact, only the source node can solicit for gateways. Intermediate node just aids the source node to make a solicitation decision by sending a special RERR. If the source node eventually detects a route error when forwarding a packet with a SRO towards an Internet destination, and it fails to nd other valid routes to its current gateway, it may be triggered to solicit unicast advertisements from gateways by invoking an external route discovery towards the Internet destination. 5.4.2 Source node operations: If the triggering node handling the data packet is a source node type, it will operate as follows: Access the address list eld in the SRO of the data packet. Copy the value of the last hop in the address list to a temporary variable gw_addr. Check the rst hop external ag and last hop external ag in the SRO of the data packet. Next, the triggering node will check whether the following conditions are satised: Figure 7 Advertisement unicast packet format in DSR 756 IET Commun., 2009, Vol. 3, Iss. 5, pp. 752763 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009 doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2008.0275 www.ietdl.org The source route option in the data packet being handled by this triggering node has a last hop external ag (L). This means that the data packet is generated by this triggering node, towards an Internet destination. The value in the temporary variable gw_addr matches the triggering nodes current gateway address. This means that the broken source route contained in the data packets SRO is through the triggering nodes current gateway. If the above conditions are satised, the triggering node will operate as follows: Access the source routes towards its current gateway address, i.e. gw_addr. If such routes do not exist in the route cache, the triggering node will clear the route cache. Consequently, if this node still generates data packets to send to the Internet destination, an external route discovery will be invoked as a solicitation trigger, because no routes exist in the route cache. Clearing the route cache also helps to remove all stale routes. The advertisements from gateways will update fresh routes. Otherwise, if the source routes towards gw_addr exist, the external routes towards the Internet destination will be rebuilt using the routes towards gw_addr. A timing diagram of reactive gateway handoff co-operated with RERC is illustrated in Fig. 8. Once the external route discovery is invoked, the triggering node broadcasts a RREQ towards the Internet destination to solicit unicast advertisements from gateways. The triggering node will collect the advertisements from gateways one by one, and update fresh routes to gateways. If the handoff to FA_New is conrmed, a registration request will be sent and registration reply will be received. Note that the external route discovery time (T 4 2T 2 ) should be dened longer than the gateway handoff latency (T 3 2T 2 ), to ensure that the initiator has selected an optimal gateway to register with before forwarding packets to the Internet destination. 5.4.3 Intermediate node operations: If the triggering node is an intermediate node type, e.g. node c in Fig. 9, it will operate as follows: Try to salvage this packet by selecting another route to the nal destination. Proceed with the handoff solicitation trigger algorithm. This may involve a special RERR creation algorithm, as shown in Fig. 10. The special RERR message will be used to notify the source node of the undeliverable data packet that a handoff solicitation may be required. The packet format of the special RERRmessage is shown in Fig. 11. Besides the standard elds, the special RERR message contains a new eld, CN address. In addition, a new Error Type: FA_HANDOFF is dened. The important elds in the special RERR message are described as follows: Error type (Error_Type): this indicates the type of this RERR. Currently, there are two values representing the Error type, NODE_UNREACHABLE (1) and FA_HANDOFF (3). Error source address (Error_Source_Addr): address of the node sending the RERR message, i.e. the node that has detected the route breakage. Error destination address (Error_Dest_Addr): address of the triggering node to which the RERR must be sent. Unreachable node address (Unreachable_Node_Addr): the next-hop address to which the data packet cannot be transmitted. Figure 8 Timing diagram of RERC in reactive gateway handoff IET Commun., 2009, Vol. 3, Iss. 5, pp. 752763 757 doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2008.0275 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009 www.ietdl.org CN address (CN_Addr): the Internet destination address, if this packet is destined to the Internet. The condition of proceeding with creating special RERR message with Error Type of FA_HANDOFF is: the undeliverable data packets SRO has an (L) ag, and this node is an intermediate node type. This special RERR message is used to prompt the source node of the data packet (error destination address) to solicit agent advertisements from gateways and commence a reactive gateway handoff evaluation. Figure 9 Handoff trigger processing in reactive gateway handoff scheme Figure 10 Special RERR creation algorithm 758 IET Commun., 2009, Vol. 3, Iss. 5, pp. 752763 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009 doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2008.0275 www.ietdl.org The creation of the special RERR message is shown in Fig. 10. The denitions of samples used to denote values of addresses inserted into these elds are as follows: source_addr: the source address in the packets IP header. dest_addr: the destination address in the packets IP header. fa_addr: the gateway address of the source node. This address is copied from the source route option, if the SRO has external ag. local_addr: the local address of the node sending the RERR. next_hop_addr: the next hop address to which the packet cannot be sent. The creation of special RERR message with error type of FA_HANDOFF can be described as follows: The error type eld is set to FA_HANDOFF. The CN_Addr eld is set to the destination address of the data packet being processed. This is used to notify the source node of the data packet (the destination of the RERR message, i.e. Error_Dest_Addr) about the address (CN) that is unreachable. On the other hand, if the error type is NODE_UNREACHABLE, the creation of the RERR message follows the DSR standard, except for the following modications: If the packet is being delivered from the Internet to the MANET, the destination of the RERR message (Error_Dest_Addr) should be the gateway through which the packet is forwarded, rather than the original source node on the Internet as normal in DSR. The CN_Addr eld is set to blank. If the packet does not have any external ag (L or F), the CN_Addr eld is set to blank. Finally, the RERR packet will be forwarded to the previous hop towards the Error_Dest_Addr. 5.4.4 Processing special RERR message: As described above, a special RERR message is originated by intermediate node (e.g. node c in Fig. 9). All nodes receiving the special RERR message will rst delete all source routes containing the broken link, i.e. error source address to unreachable node address. However, all intermediate nodes just process the special RERR message as a normal RERR. Only the source node (error destination address, e.g. node d in Fig. 9) of the SRO data packet can handle the RERR that is of FA_HANDOFF type. On receiving the special RERR message whose error type is FA_HANDOFF, the source node will check whether the routes towards its current gateway FA_Old are still available in the route cache. If such routes are available, the source node will rebuild external routes towards the CN address obtained from the special RERR, using the routes towards the current gateway. In case such routes are not available, the source node will clear the route cache to remove all stale routes. As a result, if the external route to the Internet destination has been erased, and the source node still has data packets to send towards the Internet destination, a new RREQ targeting the external destination will be launched. This is considered a solicitation trigger. Consequently, the source node will start a reactive handoff evaluation. 5.5 Handoff evaluation mechanisms As stated in Section 4.1.4, on receiving an advertisement, MIPRC will send handoff interrupt to MANET module. The handoff evaluation mechanism for selecting an optimal gateway is an added function within the MANET module, which should be designed widely adaptable to various MANET routings underneath, for instance, using shorter path hops or shorter packet delivery delay as selection criterion. In this work, DSR will perform the handoff evaluation algorithm as follows: if a valid route towards FA_Old is not available, or, if the hop count to FA_New is shorter than the one to FA_Old, a Handoff Trigger will be sent to the MIPRC for sending a registration request to FA_New using cached advertisement information. The handoff evaluation algorithm is shown in Fig. 12. Only the handoff trigger allows MIPRC to start handoffs. Consequently, a handoff phase is started by expecting a registration reply, as described in MIPRC. 5.6 Optimisation considerations Mobile IP may utilise the following optimisations: Handoff postponement: The unexpected delays of unicast advertisement may result in unnecessary handoffs, as mobile node may not receive the advertisement from the closest gateway rst. Thus, the handoff postponement allows a short period to evaluate all unicast advertisements from available gateways before making the nal handoff decision. Advertisement lter threshold: This is a minimum delay threshold, in order to reject these extra long-delay Figure 11 DSR special RERR option IET Commun., 2009, Vol. 3, Iss. 5, pp. 752763 759 doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2008.0275 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009 www.ietdl.org advertisements, as the hop count towards the gateway may not be effective criterion in this case. Advertisement unicast postponement: The unicast postponement is dened for the gateway to unicast an advertisement with a short delay upon receiving the solicitation (RREQ). This is to avoid the collision of unicast advertisement with the RREQ broadcast. The priority algorithm for sorting multiple DSR routes in the route cache is designed as follows: Among all routes towards the same destination, the route with the fewest hops has the highest priority. Among all routes with the same hop count towards the same destination, the latest updated route has the highest priority. The routes towards the current gateway have the same lifetime as the external routes agged with (L). After a successful gateway handoff, the routes towards external destinations via the old gateway must be removed, and these external routes must be rebuilt to use the new gateway. 6 Proactive gateway handoff mechanism A scheme of piggybacking routing information on broadcasting advertisements, as well as utilising MIPRC for proactive handoff evaluation is presented. 6.1 Mobile IP signalling message propagation To enable multi-hop propagations of advertisements, every ad hoc node must rebroadcast received advertisements. If routing information is not piggybacked on the advertisements, redundant route discoveries towards gateways in the following registration procedure will occur. Thus, piggybacking routing information on broadcast advertisements can decrease routing overhead and delay caused by redundant route discoveries. The standard DSR does not allow the rebroadcasting of data packets other than the RREQ. In order to enable rebroadcasting of an agent advertisement, a new packet format, DSR broadcasting advertisement (Fig. 13), is created. First, the mobile IP module on the gateway generates a standard agent advertisement packet, and transfers this packet to DSR. The DSR header (Fig. 14) follows the IP header of the advertisement packet, as shown in Figs. 13 and 15. The Option Type eld is lled up with Advertisement; the identication eld is lled up with the same value copied from the Identication eld in the advertisement extension. The Destination eld in the IP header remains unchanged (255.255.255.255); the TTL in the IP header is set to the network dimension. Subsequently, this advertisement packet is broadcast via all interfaces. On receiving the advertisement, a node will follow advertisement ID checking algorithm using an advertisement forwarding table to drop duplicate Figure 12 Handoff evaluation algorithm 760 IET Commun., 2009, Vol. 3, Iss. 5, pp. 752763 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009 doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2008.0275 www.ietdl.org Advertisements. The algorithm of processing source routing information follows the DSR protocol specications. Finally, an advertisement extension packet will be passed to the MIPRC for further processing, and a copy of the packet will be rebroadcast again. 6.2 Handoff trigger There are three options for the proactive handoff evaluation trigger on receiving multiple periodic advertisements, as follows: Compare all advertisements synchronously. This is not likely to happen as gateways may not synchronously advertise and even the same advertisement cannot be received by all mobile nodes synchronously because of the multi-hop relay latency. Compare advertisements after predened listening period. As the gateways do not advertise synchronously, the listening period can be very long, and the routing information varies during the listening period. Thus, a mobile node may use stale routing information to make handoff decision. Therefore this option is vulnerable to changes of topology and will not be adopted. Compare individually received periodic advertisements with the current gateway address. This is a promising choice, which overcomes the drawbacks of the above two options. This option will be adopted here. The handoff evaluation algorithm is the same as in Section 5.5 and Algorithm 1. After several consecutive handoffs, the mobile node can associate itself with the closest gateway among all available gateways. 7 Simulation results 7.1 Scenario The simulation model is created using OPNET Modeler v10.5. An ultimate reason of requiring multiple gateway handoffs is that a mobile node needs better service from an optimal gateway, to communicate with the Internet. Because of the handoffs among multiple gateways in the MANET, the packets from a source node may go through different gateways to arrive at the nal destination on the Internet. Thus, the objective is to justify the efciency of the multiple gateway handoffs by evaluating the end-to-end performance between the MN and the Internet against different numbers of gateways. The performance metrics include the end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, mobile IP routing overhead and DSR routing overhead. The MANET is deployed in a square area of 2000 m 2000 m; 100 ad hoc nodes are initially deployed evenly on a grid with 200 m 200 m spacing. Only one mobile node moves at 15 m s 21 ; other 99 nodes are static. A segment-based trajectory is used, which denes the mobile nodes movement using two-dimensional co-ordinates and Figure 13 DSR broadcast advertisement packet format Figure 15 DSR advertisement option Figure 14 DSR header Table 1 DSR common parameters Parameters Value Route expiry time, s 300 Sending buffer expiry time, s 30 Maximum request table size, nodes 64 Maximum route cache size, routes 400 Maximum request retransmissions 0 Maximum request period, s 0.2 Request holdoff time, s 0.22 Gratuitous route reply timer, s 1 Maximum maintenance buffer size, packets 50 Maintenance holdoff time, s 0.25 Maximum maintenance retransmissions 2 Maintenance acknowledgement timer, s 0.12 Cached reply disabled Salvaging enabled One-hop-propagating RREQ disabled IET Commun., 2009, Vol. 3, Iss. 5, pp. 752763 761 doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2008.0275 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009 www.ietdl.org traversal-time values. The segments include locations randomly and widely spread over the simulated region. The advantage of using trajectory is that an accurate control and repeatability of the moving pattern across different simulation runs can be guaranteed. This is to ensure the simulation results are merely different because of the schemes, but not because of the unpredictable factors. The mobile node maintains a peer-to- peer custom application utilising REQ/NO-RESP with Internet CN. The REQ packet size is 64 bytes; the packet sending rate is 20 packet/s. The simulation time is 1 h. Tables 1 and 2 show the common parameters of protocols. The varying advertising intervals used for proactive gateway handoff scenario are: 5 s, 20 s, 40 s. The 802.11 MAC layer is modied to support BSS/IBSS hybrid mode; the data rate is 11 Mb; the transmission range is around 300 m. The simulation performance is evaluated against various numbers of FAs (14). For all simulation experiments, RERC is used for external route discovery with the external route discovery time parameter set to a xed value, 220 ms, as this parameter should be larger than the maximum round trip time of the RREQ/RREP cycle across the MANET area. 7.2 Results The simulationresults are showninFig. 16. Under the proactive gateway handoff, more frequent advertising allows the mobile node to maintain shorter paths towards its registered gateway, which ensures better end-to-end delay (Fig. 16a) and PDRs (Fig. 16b). It is obvious that the mobile IP overhead (Fig. 16d) is the dominating overhead. The majorities of DSR overhead are SRO packets. As SRO packet overhead is Table 2 Mobile IP common parameters Parameters Value Registration retry interval, s 1 Registration retry times 5 Lifetime granted, s 1800 Max supporting hosts 400 Advertisement unicast postponement, s 0.015 Handoff postponement, s 0.03 Advertisement lter threshold, s 0.2 Figure 16 Simulation results a Average end-to-end delay b Packet delivery ratio c DSR overhead d Mobile IP overhead 762 IET Commun., 2009, Vol. 3, Iss. 5, pp. 752763 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009 doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2008.0275 www.ietdl.org proportional to the total path hops that all SRO packets travel through in the MANET, the less frequent advertising leads to more DSR overhead (Fig. 16c) because of longer paths established between the mobile node and its gateway. With more number of serving gateways, the mobile node achieves more opportunities of dynamically executing gateway handoffs to select closer gateway. Hence, the end- to-end delay (Fig. 16a) and DSR overhead (Fig. 16c) can be both decreased because of shorter paths available. If there is no gateway handoffs, i.e. only one gateway, the end-to-end delay (Fig. 16a) and PDRs (Fig. 16b) are worse than other cases of activating multiple gateways. This proves that dynamic gateway handoffs can efciently improve end-to-end performance. Obviously, mobile IP overhead signicantly increases because of the increasing number of gateways, which may impact on the PDRs under proactive gateway handoff (Fig. 16b). The reactive gateway handoff generally outperforms the Proactive-40 s scenario, but does not surpass the Proactive- 5 s and Proactive-20 s scenarios, except for the signicantly low mobile IP overhead (Fig. 16d). This is because in proactive gateway handoff, the mobile node can maintain the connectivity with its current gateway while simultaneously evaluating and performing handoff to a new gateway. With shorter advertising intervals, the mobile node may have more chances to update shorter paths. Certainly, the very high mobile IP overhead is a huge cost. On the contrary, the reactive gateway handoff can offer satisfactory end-to-end delay (Fig. 16a) at a signicantly low overhead cost. In a multiple-gateway environment, the reactive gateway handoff approach is particularly advantageous, as the increasing overhead caused by additional gateways is not signicant. This proves that reactive gateway handoff is a feasible and efcient scheme. 8 Conclusions A design for adaptive mobile IP handoffs among multiple gateways in the MANET is presented. Executing gateway handoffs is of great signicance to reducing the end-to-end delay, as a mobile node can always be connected with the closest gateway. However, with multiple gateways, the high mobile IP overhead is a serious disadvantage in proactive gateway handoff. Thus, the proposed reactive gateway handoff scheme is more appropriate for use in resource- limited ad hoc networks with multiple gateways. The reactive gateway handoff scheme may exhibit satisfactory end-to-end delay with signicantly low mobile IP overhead. In summary, the reactive gateway handoff is a promising scheme worth more attention in the future. 9 Acknowledgments The author thanks the ITR at UniSA to provide OPNET Modeler software for education use. The author also gratefully thanks Associate Professor Arek Dadej and Dr. Steven Gordon for helpful comments in research. 10 References [1] FRATTASI S., FATHI H., FITZEK F., PRASAD R., KATZ M.: Dening 4G technology from the users perspective, IEEE Network, 2006, 20, pp. 3541 [2] PERKINS C.E.: IP mobility support. 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