Survey of Multipath QoS Routing Protocols For Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is composed of mobile nodes without any infrastructure. MANET applications such as audio/video conferencing, webcasting requires very stringent and inflexible Quality of Service (QoS). The provision of QoS guarantees is much more challenging in MANETs than wired networks due to node mobility, limited power supply and a lack of centralized control. Multi-path routing in MANETs can thus better support QoS and provides benefits such as fault tolerance, load balancing, bandwidth aggregation, and improvement in QoS metrics such as delay and overhead. Many researches have been done so as to provide QoS assurances by designing various multipath routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper, some of the multipath QoS routing protocols have been surveyed. The relative strengths and weaknesses of the protocols have also been studied which allow us to identify the areas for future research. Finally, a comparative study of all the multipath routing protocols is provided