A bandwidth-reservation mechanism for on-demand ad hoc path finding

One of the major challenges faced by designers of ad hoc network systems is the deployment of end-to-end quality-of-service support mechanisms. This paper describes QoS-AODV, an integrated route discovery and bandwidth reservation protocol. QoS-AODV is designed to operate within a TDMA network. Unlike other path finding and route discovery protocols that ignore the impact of the data link layer, QoS-AODV incorporates slot scheduling information to ensure that end-to-end bandwidth is actually reserved. Further, QoS-AODV is an enhanced version of the Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector routing protocol, and is therefore compatible with proposed route discovery and maintenance techniques. In order to test the effectiveness of our protocol we implemented a version of QoS-AODV, along with two similar protocols, in the ns-2 simulator. Our experiments showed the QoS-AODV significantly improved the probability of being able to find an end-to-end QoS path.