To achieve the seamless mobility for Internet mobile users who roam between Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) and other parts of the Internet, one must consider a mechanism for efficient mobility management and handoff support in such an environment. This thesis presents a novel scheme to integrate MANETs with the Internet and support mobility across Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) and MANETs. The mobiles, connected as a MANET, employ the Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol for routing within the MANET. Mobility management across WLANs and MANETs is achieved through the Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) protocol. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first proposal to exploit the salient features of HMIPv6 in such a hybrid network architecture integrating MANETs with the Internet.; An implementation of the OLSR with HMIPv6 scheme is also presented in this thesis, which extends the OLSR protocol and ICMP6 protocol to support the cooperation of OLSR and HMIPv6.; Another contribution of this thesis is a performance evaluation on a HMIPv6 based testbed composed of WLANs and MANETs. A set of performance benchmarks and metrics is exploited to quantify the impact of various factors of OLSR and HMIPv6 on the handoff latency and packet loss. Furthermore, the efficiency gain obtained from using HMIPv6 in such a hybrid network is investigated. The investigation result shows that the use of HMIPv6 can achieve up to 27% gain on reducing the handoff latency when a mobile roams within a domain. Concerning the reduction of the signaling load on the Internet, the use of HMIPv6 can achieve at least a 54% gain and converges to 69%.
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