Abstract
Although a standalone and isolated mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is practical in many scenarios, integration with the Internet is much more advantageous. The integration of a MANET with the Internet provides MANET users with Internet access and hence increases the scope of the MANET application. In addition, the Internet can benefit from this integration by an extension of the network coverage area. However, the integration of heterogeneous networks raises many issues. To overcome the incompatibilities between different architectures, gateways are used. This paper proposes a lightweight integration scheme for a MANET and the wider Internet, based on the optimized link state routing (OLSR). OLSR routing messages are reengineered and optimized to meet the needs of integration without involving additional routing messages for gateway discovery. The compulsory registration of a MANET node with a gateway node in a traditional integration is not required in the proposed approach, meaning that nodes can move freely within the local MANET with no disruption in the connection to another node in the external network. The proposed system is evaluated using the OMNET++ network simulator and is compared to another existing system. The simulation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach.