QoS-aware Multipath Routing Scheme for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Providing Quality of Service (QoS) support in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) is a particularly active research area with a number of proposals being made to support real-time applications that are based upon the interaction between the routing scheme and a QoS provisioning mechanism. This paper builds upon such ideas and presents QoS-aware Shortest Multipath Source (Q-SMS) routing scheme that have been shown to offer significant network improvement when compared to previously proposed schemes. Q-SMS essentially modifies the previously proposed SMS scheme to explicitly provide QoS assurance. The new proposed scheme allows nodes to obtain and then use estimation of the residual capacity to make appropriate admission control decisions. The performance differentials are investigated using Network Simulator 2 (NS-2). Results demonstrate the merits of the proposed scheme with a 16% increase in goodput while end-to-end delay is reduced by 37% when compared with SMS and the necessity of QoS-aware multipath routing schemes in MANETs becomes more apparent.