Published in IET Communications

Received on 6th May 2008

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2008.0275 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009
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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.
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IET Commun., 2009, Vol. 3, Iss. 5, pp. 752763 763
doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2008.0275 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009
www.ietdl.org