A review of QoS routing protocols in MANETs

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is an autonomous collection of mobile nodes forming a dynamic network and communicating over wireless links. Owing to its uniqueness such as easy deployment and self-organizing ability, it has shown great potential in many civil and military applications. As MANETs are gaining popularity, their need to support real time and multimedia applications is rising as well. Such applications have Quality of Service (QoS) requirements like bandwidth, end-to-end delay, jitter and energy. Consequently, it becomes very necessary for MANETs to have an efficient routing and QoS mechanism to support these applications. A number of QoS routing protocols with distinguishing features have been proposed recently. This paper presents a thorough overview of some of the QoS routing protocols along with their strengths and weaknesses. A comparative study of the QoS routing protocols is done and in addition, the current issues and future challenges that are involved in this exciting area of research are also included.