An Efficient Hybrid Adaptive Location-Aided Gateway Advertisement and Discovery Protocol for Heterogeneous Wireless and Mobile Networks

Recent advances in wireless communications and the availability of Heterogeneous Wireless and Mobile Networks (HWMNs) have enabled the development of interesting applications. The main objective of HWMNs is the delivery of wireless services to potential applications in personal, local, campus, and metropolitan areas. However, in these networks, there is a need of gateway discovery mechanisms that will support several of these HWMN applications. It is essential that the deployment of a gateway discovery protocol in HWMNs does not degrade the performance of existing applications in terms of bandwidth usage. Any gateway discovery approach in HWMNs is highly susceptible to this issue, due to the limited bandwidth. In this paper, we present a novel gateway discovery technique for HWMNs. Our protocol aims at providing an efficient hybrid adaptive location-aided gateway advertisement and discovery mechanism for HWMNs. Essentially, the originality of ou technique lies in its unique and novel characteristics: (i) it is built on top of the network layer; (ii) it uses channel diversity; (iii) and it is based upon a location-aided adaptation of the advertisement zone of the gateway. Our proposed approach benefits from the routing information to find the gateway service and the routing information to the gateway at the same time, thereby saving the overall bandwidth. It uses diverse channels to exchange discovery and routing packets that decreases the congestion on single channels and also the delay of gateway discovery. Our proposed gateway discovery protocol adapts the advertisement zone of gateways based on the location information and the speed of requesting wireless and mobile nodes. We discuss the implementation of our technique, and report on its performance evaluation through an extensive set of simulation experiments. Our results indicate that significant success rate can be achieved by our technique in the worst case (more than 90 percent), while guaranteeing low respo- nse time and low message complexity when compared to the selected gateway discovery approaches.