Leveraging mobility to improve quality of service in mobile networks

Existing solutions for QoS-aware routing in mobile multihop networks attempt to discover a QoS-satisfactory route for the user at the user´s current location. If a suitable route is not available at the current location, the user is denied access. This approach does not take advantage of the special characteristics of mobile multihop networks. That is, users in these networks are mobile and their connectivity is dependent on their location and the locations of other users. By changing their location, users can alter their connectivity characteristics and potentially obtain better service from the network. In this paper, we propose enhancing QoS-aware routing protocols to take advantage of this characteristic. With our solution, if a satisfactory route is not available at the user´s current location, the protocol discovers a nearby location where a better route is available. The user can then choose to move to the suggested location to improve the received quality of service. We demonstrate our idea by appropriately extending a QoS-sensitive version of the AODV routing protocol, and presenting a simulation-based evaluation. Simulation results show the effectiveness and efficiency of our idea.