Connecting Vehicle Scatternets by Internet-Connected Gateways

This paper presents an approach for interconnecting isolated clouds of an ad hoc network that form a scatternet topology using Internet gateways as intermediate nodes. The architecture developed is intended to augment FleetNet, a highly dynamic ad hoc network for inter-vehicle communications. This is achieved by upgrading FleetNet capabilities to establish a communication path between moving vehicles and the Internet via Internet gateways to facilitate direct gateway to gateway communications via the Internet, thus bridging gaps in the network topology and relaying packets closer towards their geographical destination at the same time. After outlining the overall FleetNet approach and its underlying geographical multi-hop routing, we focus on the FleetNet gateway architecture. We describe required modifications to the gateway architecture and to the FleetNet network layer in order to use these gateways as intermediate nodes for FleetNet routing. Finally, we conclude the paper by a short discussion on the prototype gateway implementation and by summarizing first results and ongoing work on inter scatternet communication.