Quality of Service Provisioning in Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Wireless networks such as Bluetooth, WLAN and WiMax have transformed the way we access information and communicate seamlessly whether we are at home, in the office, or on the move on a train, bus or even aircraft. As mobile and embedded computing devices become more omnipresent, it will become increasingly difficult to interconnect them via wires and single-hop wireless links limited by radio transmission range. This has given rise to mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) where far away nodes communicate by requesting intermediate nodes to relay their information in order to reach the destination. MANETs self-organize, self-configure and self-heal themselves. MANETs are being used in many applications ranging from emergency response situations to wireless vehicular ad hoc networks. Many applications of MANETs such as Emergency Response and First Responders have strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for their communications systems, making MANET QoS provisioning mechanisms very crucial for supporting multimedia communications such as real-time audio and video. However, QoS provisioning in MANETs is quite tough in comparison to QoS provisioning in wireline IP networks. This is due to numerous reasons such as the dynamic network topology, unpredictable communication medium and limited battery power of mobile devices forming the network. This chapter describes the challenges and the current state of the art of QoS protocols and mechanisms in MANETs.