A QoS Routing Protocol with Bandwidth Allocation in Multichannel Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile multimedia applications have recently generated much interest in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) supporting quality-of-service (QoS) communications. Multiple non-interfering channels are available in 802.11 and 802.15 based wireless networks. Capacity of such channels can be combined to achieve higher QoS performance than for single channel networks. The capacity of MANETs can be substantially increased by equipping each network node with multiple interfaces that can operate on multiple non-overlapping channels. However, new scheduling, channel assignment, and routing protocols are required to utilize the increased bandwidth in multichannel MANETs. In this paper, we propose an on-demand routing protocol M-QoS-AODV in multichannel MANETs that incorporates a distributed channel assignment scheme and routing discovery process to support multimedia communication and to satisfy QoS bandwidth requirement. The proposed channel assignment scheme can efficiently express the channel usage and interference information within a certain range, which reduces interference and enhances channel reuse rate. This cross-layer design approach can significantly improve the performance of multichannel MANETs over existing routing algorithms. Simulation results show that the proposed M-QoS-AODV protocol can effectively increase throughput and reduce delay, as compared to AODV and M-AODV-R protocols.