On the Quality of Service Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

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4.2 Challenges of QoS Support in MANETs

QoS support in MANETs is different from QoS provisioning in other wire line or infrastructured wireless networks in the sense that free node mobility may easily result in
service disruption or cause QoS guarantees violations. In fact, the characteristics of
MANETs preclude any tight bounds on QoS performance measures. For example, it
would be useless to reserve sufficient resources via a resource reservation protocol to
guarantee a worst case delay for a high priority flow, if we cannot guarantee the delay on
wireless links, especially that those links are subject to outage. This motivated applications to require at least statistical QoS guarantees, and not deterministic guarantees.
QoS routing is the facilitator for QoS provisioning in MANETs, and the solution of the
issues related to QoS routing is fundamental for enabling QoS in MANETs.
QoS is usually specified as a set of service requirements or constraints that need to be
met by the network. These service requirements are in terms of end-to-end performance,
such as delay, bandwidth, probability of packet loss, delay jitter, and so on. Power consumption, security, and service coverage area are other QoS metrics that are specific to
MANETs. Although loss probability, cost, and delay jitter are very useful QoS metrics,
delay and bandwidth are the two most popular QoS metrics. In general, the QoS metric
could be concave, multiplicative, or additive. For example, the bandwidth metric is concave, that is, a certain amount of bandwidth must be available on each link along the
path. Delay, delay jitter, and cost are additive, while the probability of packet loss can be
expressed using a multiplicative relation. In some recent work, researchers argue that
network security should be regarded as a QoS metric [13]. We will not consider security
issues in this paper, since it is an independent and a broad topic by itself. However, it is
worth noting that most security protocols increase the overhead in terms of extra messages and increased data, and therefore the required security level may also be subject to
a number of trade-offs applied by the QoS scheme. On the other hand, a QoS scheme
may opt to satisfy a set of objectives such as maximizing throughput, call admission
ratio, or packet delivery ratio.
Several technical challenges face the design of efficient QoS routing protocols in
MANETs. Some of these challenges are introduced by the nature of the participating
nodes, the node mobility, the nature of wireless links, and the employed-network-
managementstrategy. We elaborate on these challenges in detail as follows:
Challenges due to the Dynamic Topology: The issue of mobility does not exist in
fixed networks. Even in infrastructured wireless networks, the mobile nodes move
from the domain of one access point (AP) to the domain of another AP. In
MANETs, there is a high possibility that the topology may vary at a fast rate. The
complications imposed by mobility in MANETs may severely degrade the network quality. The frequent route breakage is a natural consequence of mobility,
which complicates routing. This problem is even more exacerbated when paths
need to satisfy certain QoS guarantees during the connection lifetime. When the
network topology changes too frequently, it would be a difficult task for any protocol with reasonable overhead to discover the paths, and establish the connections that provide QoS guarantees. As a result, design of QoS routing protocols is