Load balancing mechanisms in the MANET with multiple Internet gateways

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an infrastructureless wireless network that supports multi-hop communication. For the MANET nodes wishing to communicate with nodes in the wired Internet, the global Internet connectivity is required and this functionality can be achieved with the help of the Internet gateway. For the support of reliability and flexibility, multiple Internet gateways can be provisioned for a MANET. In this case, load-balancing becomes one of the important issues since the network performance such as the network throughput can be improved if the loads of the gateways are well-balanced. In this paper, we categorize the load-balancing mechanisms and propose a new metric for load-balancing. Simulation results show that our proposed mechanism using the hop distance and the number of routing table entries as a load-balancing metric enhances the overall network throughput.