QoS routing with traffic distribution in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) follow a unique organizational and behavioral logic. MANETs’ characteristics such as their dynamic topology coupled with the characteristics of the wireless communication medium make Quality of Service provisioning a difficult challenge. This paper presents a new approach based on a mobile routing backbone for supporting Quality of Service (QoS) in MANETs. In real-life MANETs, nodes will possess different communication capabilities and processing characteristics. Hence, we aim to identify those nodes whose capabilities and characteristics will enable them to take part in the mobile routing backbone and efficiently participate in the routing process. Moreover, the route discovery mechanism we developed for the mobile routing backbone dynamically distributes traffic within the network according to current network traffic levels and nodes’ processing loads. Simulation results show that our solution improves network throughput and packet delivery ratio by directing traffic through lowly congested regions of the network that are rich in resources. Moreover, our protocol incurs lower communication overheads than AODV (ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing protocol) when searching for routes in the network.