Challenges and Recent Advances in QoS Provisioning, Signaling, Routing and MAC protocols for MANETs

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET), which comprise of mobile nodes connected wirelessly, are emerging as a very important technology for future generation of wireless mobile and ubiquitous computing. MANETs are being used in numerous application domains from emergency rescue and relief to wireless sensor networks. To support real-time communications (such as audio and video) over MANETs, new quality of service (QoS) provisioning mechanisms need to be developed. There are many challenges in QoS provisioning for MANETs such as dynamically changing topology, wireless capacity limitations, heterogeneous network environment, limited battery power etc. Previous QoS surveys in MANET have only looked at QoS provisioning models, signaling and routing. This paper presents a complete survey of the challenges and current state of the art of MANET QoS routing, signaling and MAC protocols as well as the various MANET QoS models that are being developed.