| The study of wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is a rapidly growing field. MANETs are of self-organizing and autonomous nature that must be supported by an appropriate routing protocol. Unlike conventional wireless networks, MANETs have unique characteristics posing several difficulties in provisioning Quality of Service (QoS), such as dynamically varying network topology, error-prone shared radio channels, insecure media, lack of precise state information, scarce resources, absence of established backbone infrastructure, and other problems. Little consensus exists as to the optimality of any available routing approach. Current research supporting QoS in the Internet and traditional wireless networks is not suitable for MANETs leaving it an open problem. Therefore, QoS routing in MANETs needs more attention as a result of the rising popularity and necessity of real-time multimedia applications. Presently, no robust QoS routing protocol can serve a MANET environ.;In this thesis, we devise the novel Robust Quality of Service Routing (RQoSR) protocol for MANETs. RQoSR is carefully designed to be an efficient, proactive/reactive, distributed, positionless, fully-localized, robust, bandwidth-based, and stability-aware QoS routing protocol. To achieve these design objectives, we propose a new predictive node stability measure that does not require any positioning system and introduce a new ranking methodology consisting of three parts: stability measure, bandwidth value, and unique identifier. With this methodology, RQoSR constructs a QoS virtual backbone (QoS-VBB) and then initiates a routing process using our on-demand REQUEST/REPLY/REQUEST-model (RRR-model).;One contribution of this work is that our QoS-VBB selects nodes with the best rank in their domains. To the best of our knowledge, QoS-VBB is the first algorithm that has the following attractive and unique features: O(1) approximation ratio, small and constant stretch factor, and O(n) time and message complexity. These features are sufficient to construct a scalable with low cost QoS-VBB. Another contribution is the simple maintenance algorithm of RQoSR. This algorithm functions concurrently with the QoS-VBB and RRR-model algorithms to locally fix, whenever possible, VBB or route breakages.;In addition to the algorithmic description of RQoSR, we provide an analytical study for its phases. The performance of RQoSR is evaluated through extensive simulation experiments using a bona fide network simulator, NS2. |
