A quality of service analysis of energy aware routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks

With the increasing popularity in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), it has become essential for MANETs to support real time and multimedia applications. These applications demand certain levels of Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to be met by the network. However, QoS provisioning in MANETs has been a challenging task due to limited resource availability, dynamically changing network topology and inaccurate state information. Developing QoS aware routing protocols for MANETs has been an active research area over the years. But most of the QoS aware routing schemes lack in addressing the feature of energy conservation. Most researchers have argued that every QoS provisioning scheme for MANETs should be energy or power aware. In this paper, we discuss several energy aware routing schemes developed for MANETs and address their efficiency in terms of providing Quality of Service. We differentiate and compare them based on various QoS parameters and study the effects imposed by them on these parameters.