SmartGate: A MAC Protocol for Gateway Discovery in Clustered Ad-Hoc Networks

In the absence of established infrastructure, Mobile Ad-Hoc NETworks (MANETs) can provide a fast and efficient way of communication among the nodes. In this paper, the authors present a MAC protocol with clusterhead and gateway selection algorithm. Clustering schemes are expected to achieve better scalability since most of the topology changes within a cluster are hidden from the rest of the network. Here, they use Node Identifier Packet (NIP) to form the members of a cluster and depending upon several QoS metrics (e.g. bandwidth, battery life, SINR) the clusterhead has been selected.