A QoS routing protocol for delay-sensitive applications in mobile ad hoc networks

The Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol is intended for use by mobile nodes in ad hoc networks. To provide quality of service, extensions can be added to the messages used during route discovery. These extensions specify the service requirements which must be met by nodes rebroadcasting a route request (RREQ) or returning a route reply (RREP) for a destination. In order to provide quality delivery to delay sensitive applications such as voice and video, it is extremely important that mobile ad hoc networks provide quality of service (QoS) support in terms of bandwidth and delay. Most existing routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks are designed to search for the shortest path with minimum hop count. However, the shortest routes do not always provide the best performance, especially when there are congested nodes along these routes. In this paper we propose an on demand delay based quality of service (QoS) routing protocol (AODV-D) to ensure that delay does not exceed a maximum value for mobile ad hoc networks. This protocol will take into consideration MAC layer channel contention information and number of packets in the interface queue in addition to minimum hops. The protocol is implemented and simulated using GlomoSim simulator. Performance comparisons of the proposed AODV-D protocol against AODV, and QS-AODV is presented and shown that the proposed algorithm performs well.