Traffic-predictive QoS on-demand routing for multi-channel mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile multimedia applications have recently attracted numerous interests in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) supporting quality-of-service (QoS) communications. Multiple non-interfering channels are available in 802.11- and 802.15-based wireless networks. Channel assignment depends on the available bandwidth at involved nodes and the bandwidth consumption required by a new flow. Predicting available bandwidth of a node in wireless networks is challenging due to the shared and open nature of the wireless channel. This paper proposes a traffic-predictive QoS on-demand routing(TPQOR) protocol to support QoS bandwidth and delay requirements. A distributed channel assignment scheme and routing discovery process are presented to support multimedia communication and to satisfy QoS bandwidth requirement. The proposed channel assignment and reuse schemes can reduce the channel interference and enhance channel reuse rate. The proposed bandwidth prediction scheme can estimate the bandwidth requirement of each node for future traffic by the history information of its channel usage. Unlike many existing routing protocols, we take the traffic prediction as an important factor in route selection. The simulation results show that TPQOR protocol can effectively increase throughput, reduce loss ratio as well as delay, and avoid the influences of future interference flows, as compared to AODV protocol for a different number of channels.