Queue Management in Mobile Adhoc Networks (Manets)

Network based congestion avoidance which involves managing the queues in the network devices is an integral part of any network. Most of the mobile networks use Drop tail queue management where packets are dropped on queue overflow which is global synchronization problem. Especially in MANETs, packet loss results in increased overhead in terms of energy wasted to forward a packet which was dropped, additional energy required to retransmit this packet. Active Queue Management (AQM)[7] has been a solution to the global synchronization[2] problem in wired networks. However, if AQM is to be deployed in MANETs, it should be lightweight, proactive and easy to implement as mobile networks are resource constrained in terms of memory, processing power and battery life. This paper presents a predictive queue management strategy named PAQMAN that proactively manages the queue, is simple to implement and requires negligible computational overhead. The performance of PAQMAN has been compared with Drop tail and those results show that PAQMAN reduces packet loss ratio while at the same time increasing transmission efficiency.