Testbed Evaluation of QoS Routing Enhancements for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract—Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are a specific type of wireless network that is infrastructure-less, dynamic and self-organising. There is a growing need for MANETs to support real-time multimedia applications. Most current MANET routing protocols only support best-effort routing. By improving the QoS on MANETs, we can extend the set of multimedia services that can run on the MANET. We propose to practically implement enhancements to the AODV routing protocol and quantify the effect of these enhance-ments on the QoS achieved in a wireless grid testbed. The work will then be extended by comparing relative performance with the DYMO routing protocol. First, the routing metric will be changed from hop count to measured end-to-end delay. This will allow AODV to take the requirements of delay-sensitive applications such as voice and video services into account when selecting a route. The hypothesis is that this simple enhancement will greatly improve the level of QoS achieved