An Adaptive Gateway Discovery using Mobile Agent in MANET

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are autonomous infrastructure less networks that can establish limited range, low cost networks for sharing data between devices. In MANET every node can access only local network but if a node in MANET want to access the Internet, it need to discover an Internet gateway. To discover the gateway, the node either may depend on periodic gateway advertisement or can send solicitation message. However, these two techniques may not efficient because gateway discovery time affects efficiency and throughput. Generally a mobile node uses hop count to a gateway to access the Internet but minimum hop path may not always be best path in terms of efficiency and throughput. This path may suffer from congestion. This paper combines Mobile IP and Ant like Mobile Agent (ALMA) where Foreign Agent (FA) works like a gateway and ALMA provides routes to gateways. ALMA-MobileIP provides high connectivity and minimizes delay before starting new connections and reducing the amount of route discoveries. Keywords—MANET, Ant like Mobile agent (ALMA), ant-based routing protocol, mobile agents, Mobile IP, Handover.