A proposal for an ad-hoc network QoS gateway

The research efforts in the area of ad-hoc networks have evolved rapidly since the establishment of the IETF MANET workgroup. The major focal points have been the routing protocols, and the ongoing enhancements to the hardware of personal devices. The QoS research in ad-hoc networks has been getting less attention, compared to routing for instance, and therefore, evolved slower. Almost all of the QoS research efforts in ad-hoc networks have been focused so far on solutions within the ad-hoc network. We are interested in raising awareness to the end-to-end QoS problems when one of the communication endpoints is inside the ad-hoc network, and the other endpoint is outside. We present a unique view of the QoS in ad-hoc networks and we propose a QoS solution that operates on the gateway to the access network. The proposed gateway has a flexible design that links QoS models running on an ad-hoc network with QoS models running on the fixed structure access network. The proposal follows classical gateway design approaches to facilitate a lightweight implementation and to provide an integrated end-to-end QoS solution. Our results show that the use of our solution leads to substantial increase in effective bandwidth associated with relative decrease in bandwidth variations and end-to-end delays. In this paper, we show these enhancements, analyze the results and comment on the behavior of the proposed gateway in various operational scenarios.