Bandwidth Estimation for IEEE 802.11-Based Ad Hoc Networks

Since 2005, IEEE 802.11-based networks are able to provide a certain level of Quality of Service by the means of service differentiation, thanks to the IEEE 802.11e amendment. However, no mechanism or method has been standardized to accurately evaluate the amount of resources remaining on a given channel. Such evaluation would however be a good asset for bandwidth-constrained applications. In multi-hop ad hoc networks, such evaluation becomes even more difficult. Consequently, despite the various contributions around this research topic, the estimation of the available bandwidth still represents one of the main issues in this field. In this article, we propose an improved mechanism to estimate the available bandwidth in IEEE 802.11-based ad hoc networks. Through simulations, we compare the accuracy of the estimation we propose to the estimation performed by others state of the art QoS protocols, BRuIT, AAC and QoS-AODV.