Local data control and admission control for QoS support in wireless ad hoc networks

Wireless ad hoc networks consist of nodes having a self-centrically broadcasting nature of communication. To provide quality of service (QoS) for ad hoc networks, many issues are involved, including routing, medium-access control (MAC), resource reservation, mobility management, etc. Carefully designed distributed medium-access techniques must be used for channel resources, so that mechanisms are needed to efficiently recover from inevitable frame collisions. For ad hoc wireless networks with a contention-based distributed MAC layer, QoS support and guarantee become extremely challenging. In this paper, we address this challenging issue. We first consider MAC and resource-reservation aspects for QoS support in one-hop ad hoc wireless networks. We propose two local data-control schemes and an admission-control scheme for ad hoc networks with the IEEE 802.11e MAC standard. In the proposed fully distributed local data control schemes, each node maps the measured traffic-load condition into backoff parameters locally and dynamically. In the proposed distributed admission-control scheme, based on measurements, each node makes decisions on the acceptances/rejections of flows by themselves, without the presence of access points. The proposed mechanisms are evaluated via extensive simulations. Studies show that, with the proposed schemes, QoS can be guaranteed under a clear channel condition while maintaining a good utilization. Discussions on applying the proposed schemes into multihop ad hoc networks are also included.