Joint Topology-Transparent Scheduling and QoS Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, a framework for joint topology-transparent scheduling (TTS) and quality-of-service (QoS) routing in mobile ad hoc networks is proposed. Inspired by the fact that TTS can guarantee single-hop QoS support without the overhead due to the re-computation of transmission schedules when the network topology changes, TTS is chosen as the medium access control (MAC) in both the control and data channels. An interference model which captures the difference between communication and interference ranges is considered. Under this interference model, mechanisms in the control channel are designed to collect information of nodes outside a node´s communication range in order to provide QoS support. Based on the information collected, bandwidth calculation and reservation at individual nodes are developed to efficiently utilize the data channel resources provided by TTS. A routing protocol with (end-to-end) QoS support is then proposed by giving routing access to bandwidth information. The proposed framework using TTS as the underlying MAC to design a QoS routing protocol is demonstrated by means of simulations.