A Buffer and Energy Based Scheduling in Mobile Ad hoc Networks over Link Layer

In Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs), each node serves as a host as well as a router and uses consequently its own energy to route packets intended for other nodes. In fact, it is crucial to design techniques to reduce the energy consumption by the wireless hosts and to guarantee a certain level of quality of service (QoS). Also, in the IEEE 802.11 standard which is widely used for Wireless LANs today, a single queue is used in best-effort manner and it has no capability to support quality of service, such as bandwidth guarantee, delay and loss rate. The use of multiple queuing system with an adaptive scheduling which takes into account the energy consumption and the states of the buffers may be very important to provide QoS in MANETs. In this paper, we propose a new scheduling scheme to provide priorities over flows of traffic in order to support QoS in the wireless IEEE 802.11b. This new scheme is based on multiple queuing system and dynamic weights for each queue. These weights are accorded using buffer occupancy and residual energy. We study and analyze the performance of this scheme and compare its performance with the original IEEE 802.11 standard. Results show that the proposed scheme improves overall end-to-end throughput as well as support service differentiation over multi-hop MANETs.