Adaptive routing for ad hoc wireless networks providing QoS guarantees

A cluster-based route discovery and dynamic route management protocol for ad hoc networks with inaccurate information for given QoS (quality of service) requirements has been proposed and compared with existing routing protocols. The proposed scheme is much more scalable, the route discovery is faster (O(logN) against O(N), N being the number of nodes) and it also guarantees QoS - a feature which has not been incorporated in any existing protocol. Also, features such as local dynamic route maintenance, loop avoidance load balancing, delay bounded routing and guaranteed rate routing have been included in the architecture of ACRQ. ACRQ can also work in case of inaccurate information by assigning weights according to the probability of each information being true. This information is then used for routing decisions. Furthermore, ACRQ takes advantage of the MAC characteristics of present wireless technologies such as master-driven communication in Bluetooth. Master-driven systems encourage cluster based routing, which is also helpful for scalability. A distributed algorithm for clustering and election of cluster heads (in ACRQ protocol) with only one round of message exchange has been proposed as well.