Improving communication quality by considering route stability for inter-gateway mobile ad-hoc networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are expected to substitute for existing networks when the latter are disrupted by a disaster, etc. However, it has been pointed out that communication quality of MANETs is lower than that of existing networks, and that the use of transmission control protocol (TCP) over MANETs extremely degrades its performance. This paper considers a situation in which nodes in an isolated LAN access the Internet via MANETs, and proposes an inter-gateway control scheme named ad-hoc transport protocol on gateways (ATP-GW) in order to enhance communication quality in MANETs. A new control layer is added on top of the network layer of gateways. Metric called route stability is used to perform a variety of control. So that gateways can collaborate to control MANETs adaptively. The effectiveness of route stability has been evaluated using emulation. Not having been implemented yet, the control method is still at a proposal stage, but we plan to implement and evaluate it in order to confirm that it can predict route states of MANETs correctly, and that control based on this prediction can minimize packet losses and improve throughput.