QoS in Node-disjoint Routing for Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes that can communicate with each other without using any fixed infrastructure. It is necessary for MANETs to have efficient routing protocol and quality of service (QoS) mechanism to support multimedia applications such as video and voice. Node-Disjoint Multipath Routing Protocol (NDMR) is a practical protocol in MANETs: it reduces routing overhead dramatically and achieves multiple node-disjoint routing paths. Because QoS support in MANETs is important as best-effort routing is not efficient for supporting multimedia applications, this thesis presents a novel approach to provide that support. In this thesis NDMR is enhanced to provide a QoS enabled NDMR that decreases the transmission delay between source and destination nodes. A multi-rate mechanism is also implemented in the new protocol so that the NDMR QoS can minimise the overall delays. It is shown that these approaches lead to significant performance gains. A modification to NDMR is also proposed to overcome some of the limitations of the original.