Efficient Assessment of Available Bandwidth During DSR Route Discovery

The on-demand nature inherent to mobile ad-hoc networking systems requires mechanisms that allow for spontaneous access to remote services. Many of those services require a minimum bandwidth to operate conveniently. Therefore, not only service provider information, but also bandwidth characteristics of the corresponding communication routes should be available on demand. In this paper we propose a modification to the DSR routing protocol that allows for practical assessment of available bandwidth during the route discovery phase. This integration of routing and bandwidth assessment mechanisms not only decreases network traffic, but also provides the possibility to explicitly discover network routes that fulfill a given bandwidth requirement. This gives expedient means to applications and services that benefit from this bandwidth information i.a. for provider selection, admission control and service adaption.