QoS-aware mesh construction to enhance multicast routing in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are seen as an essential technology to support future Pervasive Computing Scenarios and 4G networks. In a MANET, efficient support of multipoint communications is essential in order to provide services like group audio and video conferencing, dissemination of data to a set of receivers or collaboration of a group of users. However, most of these interactive services have very strong requirements regarding delay and bandwidth. Controlling the end-to-end delay and maintaining low packet loss rate is vital to support interactive multimedia applications in MANETs. In this paper, we present QAMNet, an approach to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) for multicast communication in MANETs. We extend existing mesh based multicast routing protocols by introducing traffic prioritization, distributed resource probing and admission control mechanisms and adaptive rate control of non-real-time traffic based on Medium Access Control (MAC) layer feedback to maintain low delay and required throughput for real-time multicast flows. Simulation results show that, by reusing control messages already used by those protocols, our approach does not significantly increase control overhead nor state stored at nodes compared while it manages to increase packet delivery ratio and reduce latency for real-time traffic.