Multipath differentiated service in ad hoc networks

To gain wide application, QoS should be provided in ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose a multipath differentiated service model (MDS) in ad hoc networks. In contrast to the traditional methods which focus on the scheduling among different flows or packets at the routing layer, we utilize the path diversity between the source and destination nodes in ad hoc networks. It is observed that there are multiple paths between the source and destination and these paths have different qualities as throughput and end-to-end delay are considered. We take advantage of this quality difference to differentiate the service provided to different traffic. Moreover, differentiated admission control is applied to maintain the quality level of each path. We propose the basic framework of MDS and give an example to illustrate the functions of this model. The simulation results indicate that MDS can fulfill the goal of service differentiation well without introducing much modifications to the existing work.