A Reliable QoS Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks with Multi-Path Strategy

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) consists of a set of mobile hosts. The mobile hosts are capable of communicating with each other without the assistance of base stations. A MANET with a high rate of topology change makes routing especially unstable. However, stability is an important issue, especially for routing with a quality of service (QoS) provision. In this paper, we propose a reliable on-demand multi-path QoS routing (RMQR) protocol for MANETs. In this scheme, we examine the QoS routing problem associated with searching for a reliable multi-path (or uni-path) QoS route from a source node to a destination node in a MANET. The route must satisfy certain bandwidth requirements. We determine the link expiration time between two connected mobile nodes by using Global Positioning System (GPS). Then we use two parameters, the link expiration time and the number of hops, to select a routing path with low latency and high stability. Simulation results show that the proposed RMQR scheme outperforms Lin's (2001) and Liao's (2002) schemes especially in a high mobility environment