A path robustness-based quality of service routing for mobile ad hoc networks

The design of a routing protocol for the provision of quality of service (QoS) guarantee in mobile ad hoc network is basically a difficult task. In this paper, we propose a QoS routing protocol based on path robustness. The durability of a path and end-to-end delay are used as a measure of path robustness. As the topology of such a network is highly dynamic, the links are susceptible to frequent failures causing QoS disruption and degradation of the network throughput. The proposed protocol tries to identify multiple node-disjoint paths that are more robust to send data successfully from a given source to a destination within a specific time. The identified paths are selected depending upon the durability and end-to-end delays. Thus, these paths implicitly satisfy QoS in terms of the durability and end-to-end delays. In addition, traffic preference policy is proposed to send the packets through the preferred QoS paths. While evaluating the performance of the protocol we focus on the following parameters: the average end-to-end delay, the average network durability and QoS satisfaction ratio. The proposed protocol performs better as compared to the existing protocols.