Title: Quality of service adaptation in mobile ad hoc networks

Authors: Ronan De Renesse, Piyush Khengar, Vasilis Friderikos, A. Hamid Aghvami

Addresses: Centre for Telecommunications Research, King's College London, London, UK. ' Centre for Telecommunications Research, King's College London, London, UK. ' Centre for Telecommunications Research, King's College London, London, UK. ' Centre for Telecommunications Research, King's College London, London, UK

Abstract: Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) use hosts as routers to forward data from source to destination, thus, avoiding the need for an infrastructure. Due to the unreliable nature of the shared wireless medium as well as risks of route failure (due to mobility), supporting Quality of Service (QoS) in ad hoc networks is a rather challenging task. QoS routing is used to find paths that can support QoS requirements, based on network information acquired during the route discovery process, and/or using periodic monitoring. If the QoS demand goes beyond the network capacity, the call admission procedure generally rejects any incoming QoS request, thus, avoiding the quality deterioration of existing QoS flows. However, channel conditions are likely to change and might threaten QoS provision at any time. Therefore, a strategy is needed to reinstate QoS guarantees when at risk. Whenever best-effort traffic deterioration is not applicable or useful, a QoS flow has to be sacrificed for the sake of others. The selection of the victim QoS flow expresses a need for conflict resolution policies. This paper is divided into two distinct parts. We quantitatively assess the risk for QoS deterioration in MANETs in the first part. Then, in the second part, we propose and simulate various QoS conflict resolution strategies in order to tackle QoS degradation in the most efficient way.

Keywords: admission control; mobile ad hoc networks; MANETs; conflict resolution; QoS degradation; quality of service; carrier sensing; mobility; mobile networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2008.022708

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2008 Vol.4 No.4, pp.238 - 249

Published online: 25 Jan 2009 *

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