A Cross-Layer QoS Design with Energy and Traffic Balance Aware for Different Types of Traffic in MANETs

Efficient quality of service (QoS) provisioning for mobile ad hoc networks is a challenging task, especially for different types of traffic. The IEEE 802.11e has provided QoS support through priority scheduling for different types of traffic at the media access layer (MAC). However, the 802.11e QoS mechanism has an impact on the higher layer, i.e., network layer and causes some new problems that need to be considered carefully, such as the path correlation between different data types which will result in much re-routing under heavy traffic load, especially when they share a common link. In this paper, we propose a cross layer design scheme for different types of traffic. In the MAC layer, we bundle the control packet and data packet. And in the network layer, we select the efficient path according to traffic balance and energy consumption of nodes for different types of traffic. If the different types of traffic have common links, we exploit virtual circuit to avoid path correlation. Hence, our scheme can provide better QoS for different types of traffic. Our simulations also demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve better performance compared to the existing routing schemes.