Performance evaluation of routing protocols for QOS support in rural mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

We evaluate several routing protocols, and show that the use of bandwidth and delay estimation can provide throughput and delay guarantees in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). This thesis describes modifications to the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol to implement the Quality Aware Source Routing (QASR) network routing protocol operating on an 802.11e link layer. QASR network nodes exchange node location and flow reservation data periodically to provide information necessary to model and estimate both the available bandwidth and the end-to-end delay of available routes during route discovery. Bandwidth reservation is used to provide end-to-end Quality of Service, while also utilizing the differentiated Quality of Service provided by the 802.11e link layer. We show that QASR performs significantly better in several performance metrics over the DSR and the Ad-Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocols, and performs more consistently in all quality metrics when traffic demand exceeds network capacity.