QoS-Aware Multipath Communications over MANETs
Muath A. Obaidat, M. Akhtar Ali, Ihsan Shahwan, Mohammad S. Obaidat, Suhaib A. Obeidat · Journal of Networks · 2013
To enhance the Quality of service (QoS) communications over mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), this paper proposes QoS-Aware Multipath Routing Protocol (QMRP). Delay is the most crucial factor for multimedia applications which can be minimized by providing more than one path between source-destination pair as well as choosing the path based on the quality in terms of reliability and stability of the link. To the best of our knowledge no one before included projected load; load introduced by the node requesting a path to a destination into the delay computation for a path between source-destination pair as well as maintaining loop freedom through the neighbor hop list of the source. The originality of the proposed protocol comes from the fact that it introduces this new parameter into route quality computation which makes QMRP unlike its precursors providing more accurate measure of the realistic delay as well as maintaining loop freedom of multiple node disjoint paths using neighbor hop list. Cross layer communications between physical (PHY), MAC and routing layers interact to achieve QoS against the network and channel dynamics by minimizing delay and choosing more reliable and stable paths without requiring any additional resources. Performance evaluation of the proposed protocol against a single path AODV routing protocol using OPNET has been conducted. Results show that QMRP outperforms AODV in terms of E2E delay, packet delivery fraction (PDF) and route discovery frequency. However, routing overhead for QMRP is more than that of AODV due to the discovery of more one path in each route discovery process.