Enhanced QoS based routing in IPv6 ad hoc network

A wireless ad hoc network is an unpredictable network as the connections between nodes are not static. They consist of multiple network nodes that work together cooperatively without any intervention of a centralized management. Having such a dynamic nature naturally brings uncertainties in the ad hoc network such as the state of the links in between nodes and routing metrics as they might be indefinite and inaccurate. Changes and breakage of links between the nodes are rapid. Hence, real time applications encounter problem in providing Quality-of-Service (QoS) for the end users. IPv4 which provides “Best-of-Efforts” in delivering the multimedia payloads throughout the network is not enough to satisfy the end users where the dynamic nature of wireless ad hoc network comes into the big picture. Eventually, IPv6 is introduced to alleviate and replace IPv4 by promises such as wider range of IP addresses and special handling for QoS needed applications. Therefore, this paper presents an adaptive routing scheme that works with IPv6 that provides QoS for real time applications transmission in such an unpredictable ad hoc network by exploiting the Flow label resided in the IPv6 packet header.