Much effort and progress has been made toward solving the
problem of routing packets inside an ad hoc network, or from single hop
wireless networks to the wired Internet, but there are presently few proposals
for connecting ad hoc networks with the Internet and little is known about the
actual performance of these proposals. This thesis is the first work to
demonstrate the employment of micromobility protocols for the integration of ad
hoc networks with the Internet and to provide a performance comparison of two
key micromobility management protocols. The simulation results for the
Hierarchical Mobile IP and HAWAII protocols are based on an ad hoc network of
50 wireless mobile nodes moving about and communicating with a corresponding
wired host within the same subnet or in a different subnet, or with a wireless
mobile node of another ad hoc network, using the Destination-Sequenced
Distance-Vector (DSDV) ad hoc routing protocol. For simulating different speeds
of a mobile user under different communication scenarios, three different node
movement speeds and four different simulation scenarios have been studied. As
mobile users frequently change the access point while moving within one WLAN to
a different WLAN, three subnets were used for the simulation, and handoff
performance as well as wandering nodes effect are investigated in this work.
The performance of each micromobility protocol is analyzed and explained from
its design decisions. The detailed simulation results presented in this thesis
illustrate the relative performance of HAWAII and Hierarchical Mobile IP in
terms of packet delivery ratio, ad hoc routing protocol overhead and control message
overhead.