A novel out-of-band signaling mechanism for enhanced real-time support in tactical ad hoc wireless networks

Ad hoc wireless networks have been an increasingly important area of research in the recent past. One issue of great interest in this area is the provision of real-time support. While existing military applications use reservation-based approaches to provide real-time bandwidth guarantees, these schemes are adversely affected by node mobility. We propose an enhanced real-time support scheme that uses a novel out-of-band signaling mechanism to predict future mobility patterns and take corrective action when needed. We also propose an architecture to support differentiated service classes. This helps mobility affected nodes to take proactive measures so as to offer better real-time services to bandwidth critical applications. Through extensive simulations, we show that the use of the out-of-band signaling leads to better real-time support overall, and better response to the more critical classes as needed. We also provide a theoretical analysis for estimating the probability of disruption of a real-time call.