Probabilistic Prediction of Available Bandwidth in Multi-Hop Ad-Hoc Networks

Applications for future mobile communication systems have to adapt their behavior to the sparse and fluctuating bandwidth resources coming along with wireless multi-hop networks. For this reason, it is not only necessary to determine the currently available bandwidth for a given connection, but also to predict the bandwidth that will be available in the near future. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic approach that considers a combination of temporal and spatial dependencies to estimate the probability of a requested bandwidth being available in the near future. Our technique is designed to impose a minimum of additional network traffic and thus offers practical means for the adaption of upcoming data transmissions.