PERFORMANCE ISSUES IN MIXING CELLULAR AND MANET FOR iNET

Abstract

In the iNET community, communications between Test Articles (TA) and Ground Station (GS) can be over a long distance course that places a TA at ranges where they are sometimes beyond line-of-sight (LoS) or over-the-horizon communications with the GS. In other cases, the TA moves out of the LoS communications range of GS. There is a need to provide communications to these TA at these over-the-horizon locations. The Cellular and Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) have attracted a lot of attention recently and the field continues to grow daily. The cellular network offers high capacity but limited in coverage due to its fixed base infrastructure. MANET on the other hand has a wide range of coverage and also high data rates, but its throughput performance is reduced at high capacity. The MANET cellular mixture network (MCMN) has been proposed to provide an extensive communications between the TA and GS in the iNET environment. This work presents a performance evaluation and analysis of the two different networks with respect to the performance needs of iNET environment which include coverage and throughput.