Throughput Assurances Through Admission Control for Multi-Hop MANETs

In multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) it is difficult to provide throughput guarantees due to the lack of central co-ordination, mutual contention between nodes, collisions, node mobility and an error-prone wireless channel. Existing QoS-aware admission control protocols for multi-hop MANETs either ignore the effect of collisions, or do not consider the increase in collision rate upon traffic admission. However, we have found that such effects have a significant impact on the achievable throughput. In this work we therefore present a novel low-complexity passive observation-based admission control scheme for ensuring that sessions' throughput requirements are upheld in a contention-based, collision-prone multi-hop MANET. We show, via simulations, that in large networks, even at offered traffic loads greatly exceeding the network capacity, at least 88% of admitted sessions maintain their desired throughput throughout their duration. For all traffic loads, average packet delay and packet loss ratio remain below 55 ms and 1% respectively.