Adaptive Hybrid Mobile Agent Protocol for Wireless Multihop Internet Access

Abstract

Internet-based Mobile Ad Hoc Networking (MANET) is an emerging technology that supports self-organizing mobile networking infrastructures. This is expected to be of great use in commercial applications for the next generation Internet users. A number of technical challenges are faced today due to the heterogeneous, dynamic nature of this hybrid MANET. A new hybrid routing scheme AODV_ALMA is proposed, which act simultaneously combining mobile agents to find path to the gateway to establish connection with Internet host and on-demand distance vector approach to find path in local MANET is one of the unique solution. An adaptive gateway discovery mechanism based on mobile agents making use of pheromone value, pheromone decay time and balance index is used to estimate the path and next hop to the gateway. The mobile nodes automatically configure the address using mobile agents first selecting the gateway and then using the gateway prefix address. The mobile agents are also used to track changes in topology enabling high network connectivity with reduced delay in packet transmission to Internet. The performance tradeoffs and limitations with existing solutions for various mobility conditions are evaluated using simulation.