Wireless Internet Gateways (WINGS)

Todays internetwork technology has been extremely successful in linking huge numbers of computers and users. However, to date, this technology has been oriented to computer interconnection in relatively stable operational environments, and thus cannot adequately support many of the emerging civilian and military uses that require a more adaptive and more easily deployed technology. In particular, multihop packet radio networks are ideal for establishing instant communication infrastructures in disaster areas resulting from flood, earthquake, hurricane, or fires, supporting U.S. military doctrine for reliable, secure infrastructures for communication among all tiers down to the soldiers on-the-move, and extending the global communication infrastructure to the wireless, mobile environment. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA is sponsoring the development of wireless internet gateways WINGs as part of the DARPA Global Mobile GloMo Information Systems program. WINGs are wireless IP routers that enable the seamless marriage of distributed, dynamic, selforganizing, multihop wireless networks with the emerging multimedia Internet. This paper describes the WING architecture and novel communication protocols for channel access and routing, as well as the hardware and software development environment used to prototype and demonstrate wireless mobile internetworking.