A flexible quality of service model for mobile ad-hoc networks

Quality of service (QoS) support in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) is a challenging task. Most of the proposals in the literature only address certain aspects of the QoS support, e.g., QoS routing, QoS medium access control (MAC) and resource reservation. However, none of them proposes a QoS model for MANETs. Meanwhile, two QoS models have been proposed for the Internet, viz., the integrated services (IntServ) model and the differentiated services (DiffServ) model, but these models are aimed for wired networks. In this paper, we propose a flexible QoS model for MANETs (FQMM) which considers the characteristics of MANETs and combines the high quality QoS of IntServ and service differentiation of Diff-Serv. Salient features of FQMM include: dynamics roles of nodes, hybrid provisioning and adaptive conditioning. Preliminary simulation results show that FQMM achieves better performance in terms of throughput and service differentiation than the best-effort model.