Quality of Service Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

With the continuing advances in computing and wireless technologies, Mobile Ad Hoc networks (MANETs) are expected to become an indispensable part of the computing environment in the near future. Wireless devices are constantly growing in computing speed, memory, communication capabilities and features, while shrinking in weight and size. With this growth and the proliferation of these devices in every aspect of society, the need for such devices to communicate in a seamless manner is becoming increasingly essential. Multiple routing protocols have been developed for MANETs [29]. As MANETs gain popularity, their need to support real time and multimedia applications is growing as well. Such applications have stringent quality of service requirements such as bandwidth, delay, and delay jitter. Design and development of routing algorithms with QoS support is experiencing increased research interest. Several approaches which propose various routing algorithms with QoS support for MANETs have been presented in the research. This chapter discusses the issues and challenges of QoS routing in MANETS. Furthermore, a classification of these QoS routing algorithms is presented. The protocols are classified according to the most closely related best effort algorithm, as well as the model and environment they assume, and the communication layer within which they operate.