Internet connectivity for mobile ad hoc networks

The need for ad hoc networks arises when a number of mobile nodes gather in one particular location and form autonomous networks. Ad hoc networks can be adjoined to the Internet, introducing routing and addressing issues that require new features from ad hoc networking protocols. The Internet Gateway can offer global addressability and bidirectional Internet connectivity to every node in the ad hoc network. This can be done in such a way that mobile wireless nodes can migrate between wireless access points that have direct access to the wired Internet and the wireless ad hoc networks that do not have any such local access point infrastructure. Mobile IP can be employed to make such movement seamless (whenever physically possible), even though it occurs between domains with previously incompatible routing models. We believe that IPv6 and Mobile IPv6 afford important advantages for making such attachments, especially regarding router advertisement and address autoconfiguration. In this paper, we show how general ad hoc networks can be connected to the Internet by Internet Gateways, and then describe our specific experiments with Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) for IPv6 (AODV6). After demonstrating the basic principles allowing access to the Internet, we then detail our further experiments using Mobile IPv6. Copyright (C) 2002 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.