A MAC protocol to support QoS for multimedia traffic transmission over ad hoc networks

Multimedia communication over wireless networks has become the driving technology for many important applications, experiencing dramatic market growth and promising revolutionary experiences in personal communication, gaming, entertainment, military, security, environment monitoring, and more. The advances in wireless communications and growth of real-time applications have necessitated the development of wireless networks that can support high Quality of Service (QoS). In this paper, we introduce a reservation based, asynchronous MAC protocol called Multi-rate Multi-hop MAC Protocol (MMMP) for multi-hop Ad hoc networks that provides QoS guarantees for multimedia traffic. MMMP achieves this by providing service differentiation for multi-rate real-time traffic (both real time constant bit rate traffic and real time variable bit rate traffic) and guaranteeing a bounded end-to-end delay for the same while still catering to the throughput requirements of non real time traffic. In addition, it administers bandwidth preservation via a feature called 'Smart Drop' and implements efficient bandwidth usage through a mechanism called 'Release Bandwidth'. Simulation results on the QualNet simulator indicate that MMMP outperforms IEEE 802.11 on all performance metrics and can efficiently handle a large range of traffic intensity. It also outperforms other similar state of the art MAC protocols.