Abstract:
Multihop wireless network has emerged recently as an evolution of wireless network technology and are likely to be the integral part of future communication environment. In this context support for Quality of Service (QoS) is becoming an inherit necessity rather than an additional feature of the network. Due to lack of a centralized control, highly dynamic nature of topology and existence of variable and limited shared resources, traditional approaches for supporting QoS in the internet cannot be applicable to mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Given that quality of service provisioning in MANETs is extremely challenging and is a multi-layer problem, this thesis takes a holistic view to this QoS issue by identifying the key components of an overall MANET QoS framework. We take minimum throughput and maximum delay as the applications` QoS requirements to be supported by the QoS mechanisms developed in this dissertation. We begin by developing two dynamic priority based QoS- aware MAC protocols which are based on legacy IEEE 802.11 DCF and hence can easily be integrated into existing systems without much difficulty. Our first scheme, called Priority based QoS –aware MAC protocol (PQAMP) is designed for achieving enhanced level of service differentiation to provide QoS for real time traffic along with maximizing network utilization in a multihop environment.
