QAMNet: Providing Quality of Service to Ad-hoc Multicast Enabled Networks

Mobile Ad-hoc networking has been considered as one of the most important and essential technologies that support future Pervasive Computing Scenarios and 4G networks. In a mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET), support for multicast communication is essential in order to minimize overhead for group communication. For group conferencing services, controlling the end-to-end delay is important to provide high quality communication. In this paper, we present QAMNet, an approach to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) for multicast communication in MANETs. We extend existing approaches of mesh based multicasting by introducing traffic prioritization, distributed resource probing and admission control mechanisms, adaptive rate control of non-real-time traffic based on Medium Access Control (MAC) layer feedback so as to maintain low delay and required throughput for real-time multicast flows. Simulation results show that our approach is as scalable as mesh based deliver structures and does not require significantly more states than normal mesh based multicasting protocols. As we reuse signaling packets of mesh based multicast packets, we do not introduce additional signaling overhead.