QoS provisioning using BER-based routing in ad hoc wireless networks

In order to guarantee a certain level of quality of service (QoS), routing protocol should be smart enough to pick a stable and good quality communication route in order to avoid any unnecessary packet loss. Intuitively, if the chosen communication route is error-prone, it is very likely that the transmitted packets over consecutive links may get corrupted or even lost. It is well-known that retransmissions incur additional delay and increase the overhead in the network. This is very undesirable for delay sensitive applications, especially in an ad hoc wireless network environment where devices are typically power-limited and topology is constantly changing. Unlike most of the existing routing protocols for ad hoc wireless networks, in which the basic criterion for route selection is the minimization of the overall route length, in this paper we consider bit error rate (BER)-based routing, where the chosen route is the one which guarantees the lowest BER at the ending node. In other words, we consider providing QoS in terms of BER at the destination node. Our analysis shows that, according to this criterion, shortest path (SP) routing is not always the optimal choice as it often selects a path with unacceptable BER which can directly affect the end-to-end packet delay and goodput.