A review of quality of service (QoS) route provisioning in mobile ad hoc networks

With the increase of portable devices as well as rapid advancement in computing and wireless technologies, mobile ad hoc networking is gaining importance with the increasing number of widespread applications. Quality of service (QoS) routing plays a prominent role for providing QoS in mobile wireless ad hoc networks. Real time and multimedia applications need stringent QoS requirements. Providing a complete quality-of-service (QoS) solution for the ad hoc networking environment requires the interaction and co-operation of several components which include a QoS routing protocol, a resource reservation mechanism and a QoS capable medium access control (MAC) layer. The tasks of QoS routing are in general selecting routes with satisfied QoS requirement(s), and achieving global efficiency in terms of resource utilization. QoS is more difficult to guarantee in mobile ad hoc networks than in other type of networks due to the sharing of wireless bandwidth among adjacent nodes, its dynamic topology and generally imprecise network state information. This work is intended to provide a broad and comprehensive review of the QoS routing protocols proposed for ad hoc networks. This paper also describes important QoS frameworks for MANETs which attempt to provide required/promised services to each user or application.