Towards the Opportunistic Combination of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks with Infrastructure Access.

One of the main characteristics of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) is the lack of global, consistent, and up-to-date knowledge of the network topology. Thus, when routing messages, they must be forwarded from one node to the next based solely on each node's current local knowledge of the network. If, somehow, some nodes also have Internet access (even if intermittently), the mix of MANETs with that infrastructure access allows for a wider range of possibilities. In this exploratory work-in-progress paper, we argue for the opportunistic combination of ad-hoc networking with infrastructure access as a way of enabling possible optimizations. The routing protocol can leverage on the fact that some nodes might have infrastructure access and use them to make messages \"jump\" through the network whenever it pays off. Thus, we address the interaction between the ad-hoc routing and the infrastructure access by devising a decision algorithm that determines when it is better for a message to be routed through the network using ad-hoc techniques, and when it is better to route them through a tunnel where the endpoints are nodes with access to the infrastructure, enabling long \"jumps\" over the network.