Lessons learned from the simulation experience of a three-tier multi-hop wireless Internet architecture

The mobile Internet provides mobile nodes with continuous access to the Internet resources. This type of service is guaranteed only if these mobile nodes are one-hop away from the edge of the Internet. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET), however, enable multi-hop communication between mobile nodes. A more promising goal would be to connect MANET to the Internet, thus enabling mobile nodes to benefit from the multi-hop nature of MANET so they can to share access to the Internet resources with the stationary nodes. This paper aims to study a three-tier architecture to provide MANET nodes with multi-hop Internet connectivity, evaluate its performance through extensive experiments with respect to a set of decision parameters, and outline the lessons learned from these experiments.