Distributed Fault-Tolerant Quality of Wireless Networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) consists of a group of communicating hosts that form an arbitrary network topology by means of any of several wireless communication media. MANET communications represent a diversification in communication technology necessary to solve the stringent end-to-end requirements of QoS-based communication networks. Of the many challenges in this complex distributed system, the problem of routing based on a predefined set of customer preferences, critical to guaranteeing quality-of-service, is the focus of this research. Specifically, this paper modifies a cluster-based QoS routing algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks with the aim of providing fault tolerance, which is a critical feature in providing QoS in the link failure-prone environment of mobile networks. Performance of this new fault-tolerant cluster-based QoS wireless algorithm is evaluated according to failure recovery time, dropped packets, throughput, and sustained flow bandwidth via simulations involving node failure scenarios along QoS paths.