QoS Extensions to Mobile Ad Hoc Routing Supporting Real-Time Applications

Abstract

The increasing number and diversity of wireless mobile devices are driving a revolutionary change in the way users are accessing and using services and resources. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), temporarily created by mobile devices, offer opportunities for sharing services and resources made available by member nodes. Especially, real-time applications have great potentials in mobile ad hoc environments as MANETs form an ideal technological basis for ad hoc real-time interaction among people. However, real-time applications require low latency connections with a minimum of jitter and packet loss rate from the underlying network. To meet these demands is a challenging task in mobile ad hoc networks due to the high level of node mobility, properties of the wireless communication channel and the lack of central administration. In this paper, via a simulation study we analyze and evaluate some Quality of Service (QoS) extensions, like priority queuing or rate control policies, to ad hoc routing in IEEE 802.11 wireless mobile ad hoc networks from the aspects of real-time applications. We show how these QoS extensions can improve the performance of AODV routing protocol and why we selected AODV as the starting point of our work.