On the interaction between IEEE 802.11e and routing protocols in mobile ad-hoc network

The upcoming IEEE 802.11e standard was developed to offer QoS capabilities to WLAN, offering significative improvements to multimedia traffic. MANETs also benefit from this new technology since the most widely deployed and used wireless interfaces are IEEE 802.11 based. In this paper we expose results relative to the interaction of reactive routing protocols for MANETs and the IEEE 802.11e technology. We find that very substantial improvements in terms of throughput and normalized routing overhead are achieved due to increased routing responsiveness. We also detail the relation between the behavior experienced in each case and the internal mechanisms of the routing protocol being used, offering a holistic view of the phenomena.