A Multi-Path QoS Routing Protocol in a Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Network

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is one composed of a set of mobile hosts capable of communicating with each other without the assistance of base stations. This paper considers the QoS (quality-of-service) routing problem in a MANET, which is important for many real-time multimedia applications. We propose an on-demand protocol for searching for a multi-path QoS route from a source host to a destination host in a MANET, where a multi-path is a network with a source and a sink satisfying certain bandwidth requirement. Existing works all try to find a uni-path to the destination. The basic idea is to distribute a number of tickets from the source, which can be further partitioned into subtickets to search for a satisfactory multi-path. Through simulations, we justify that the value of our multi-path protocol is in its flexibility: (i) when the network bandwidth is very limited, it can offer a higher success rate to find a satisfactory QoS route than those protocols which try to find a uni-path, and (ii) when the network bandwidth is sufficient, it can perform almost the same as those protocols which try to find a uni-path (in both routing overhead and success rate).