Joint Modeling of MANET Characteristics for QoS Prediction

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are particularly difficult to manage due to the highly dynamic nature of its traffic, caused by variations on the number of users, their locations and the type of applications they use. This paper proposes a new modeling framework for mobile ad-hoc networks that integrates all important functional characteristics of a MANET and is able to predict network Quality of Service (QoS) based only on traffic measurements (or simulations), without requiring any information on the network structure, traffic routing or users' mobility. The application of the proposed framework to a specific modeling problem involves two phases: first, the network model is built from a set of (past) measurements of the gateways inbound/outbound traffic and the corresponding network QoS metrics; then, the constructed model can be used to predict (future) values of the QoS metrics based only on the inbound/outbound traffic. This framework does not impose any restrictions to the type of metrics that are selected to characterize QoS. Our results show that this approach can achieve excellent performance in terms of predicting QoS at multiple gateways, even when there are significant changes in the number of network users.