A review of Quality of Service (QoS) routing protocols for mobile Ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) consists of a collection of mobile nodes that communicate in a multi-hop way without a fixed infrastructure. Owing to its uniqueness such as easy deployment and self-organizing ability, it has shown great potential in many civil and military applications. As MANETs are gaining popularity, their need to support real time and multimedia applications is rising as well. Such applications have quality of service (QoS) requirements like bandwidth, end-to-end delay, jitter and energy. Consequently, it becomes very necessary for MANETs to have an efficient routing and QoS mechanism to support these applications. QoS provisioning for MANET can be done over different layers starting from the physical layer up to the application layer. This paper mainly looks at the problem of QoS provisioning in the perception of network layer. QoS routing aims at finding a feasible path that satisfies QoS constraints like bandwidth, end-to-end delay, jitter, energy etc. This paper provides a detailed survey of QoS routing protocols in MANETs.