End-to-end bandwidth allocation scheme for voice traffic support over MANETs

Multimedia and real-time applications require bandwidth guarantees, which can be achieved by resource reservation. However, bandwidth reservation in ad-hoc networks is a very challenging task due to the instability of radio channels, node mobility and lack of coordination between mobile nodes. Most proposed reservation protocols focus on point-to-point reservations, and only a few work has been done to propose an efficient end-to-end reservation scheme. In this paper, we propose a reservation scheme called End-to-end reservation scheme for voice and data traffic support (EERV). The basic component of our protocol is a handshake mechanism which has the role to establish point-to-point reservations, and to ensure consistency of reservations between neighbor nodes. Both data and voice sources are allowed to establish reservations with priority given to voice sources. This reservation scheme is extended to support the reservation and release of resources along a path in cooperation with the routing layer. Our reservation scheme is based on DSR, a well-known reactive routing protocol. Mobility of nodes and node failure cause frequent reservation breakages resulting in significant performance degradation. In order to resolve this issue we propose a reservation loss detection and reservation recovery mechanisms. We achieved intensive simulations to evaluate the performance of our protocol. Simulation results show the effectiveness of this protocol.