QoS routing with traffic distribution in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) follow a unique organizational and behavioral logic. MANETs’ characteristics such as their dynamic topology coupled with the characteristics of the wireless communicationmedium make Quality of Service provisioning a difficult challenge. This paper presents a new approach based on a mobile routing backbone for supporting Quality of Service (QoS) in MANETs. In real-life MANETs, nodes will possess different communication capabilities and processing characteristics. Hence, we aim to identify those nodeswhose capabilities and characteristicswill enable themto takepart in themobile routingbackbone and efficiently participate in the routing process. Moreover, the route discoverymechanismwe developed for the mobile routingbackbonedynamicallydistributes trafficwithin thenetworkaccordingtocurrentnetwork traffic levels andnodes’ processing loads. Simulation results showthatour solution improvesnetwork throughput and packet delivery ratio by directing traffic through lowly congested regions of the network that are rich in resources.Moreover,ourprotocol incurs lowercommunicationoverheads thanAODV(adhocon-demanddistance vector routing protocol) when searching for routes in the network. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.