QoS-aware TDMA for end-to-end traffic scheduling in ad hoc networks

The proliferation of low-cost broadband air interfaces has paved the way to the introduction of high-definition multimedia services in mobile and wireless networks. The cost for network resources utilization, when provisioning such services, will play a prominent role in their commercial success, since the more spare resources that can be used, the more cheaply the services can be delivered to the end users. In the context of promoting the role of ad hoc networks as service platforms for high quality multimedia applications, this article first discusses and classifies a set of issues involved in quality of service (QoS) provisioning in ad hoc networks and then presents a congestion-free TDMA algorithm for end-to-end network resources assignment via an optimized mechanism that relies on capacity requests and grants. The article also illustrates a method for invoking this algorithm to achieve efficient end-to-end QoS provisioning and concludes by showing the superiority of the proposed algorithm, as compared to other recently proposed TDMA scheduling algorithms