Routing of internal MANET traffic over external networks

Many have proposed to connect Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) to a wired backbone Internet access network. This paper demonstrates that a wired backbone network can be utilized for more than just providing access to the global Internet. Traffic between mobile nodes in the ad hoc network may also be routed via this backbone network to achieve higher throughput, and to reduce the load in the ad hoc network. This is referred to as transit routing. This paper proposes a cost metric algorithm that facilitates transit routing for some of the traffic flows between nodes in the MANET. The algorithm aims at carrying out transit routing for a flow only when it leads to improvements of the performance. The proposal is implemented and tested in the ns-2 network simulator, and the simulation results are promising.