Performance Modeling of MANET Interconnectivity

The proliferation of mobile wireless computing devices and the increasing usage of wireless networking have motivated substantial research in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In addition, much has also been done to link autonomous MANETs to the Internet, and as MANETs become more prevalent, the need to interconnect multiple MANETs becomes increasingly important too. However, direct interconnection of MANETs has rarely been studied. In this paper, we first report an experimental study on the performance of interconnected MANETs running two different routing protocols, viz., the Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocols, which represent the two major categories, and show that with the use of multiple gateways, it is possible to viably interconnect multiple networks running different MANET routing protocols. We then follow with a simulation study to evaluate the performance in large networks, which not only validates the scalability of the proposed scheme, but also helps to identify various problems that were not apparent in small experimental networks.