Ad hoc routing metrics and applied weighting for QoS support

Abstract

In the vast majority of ad hoc routing protocols, the hop-counting mechanisms for identifying the optimal route are dominant. However, this approach oversimplifies such a complex decision by ignoring the fact that participating devices may have considerably unequal performance characteristics and utilisation status. Accordingly, it is possible for an optimal route to be composed of devices with high utilisation status or low battery reserves, which results in an overall unreliable route. This research work tackles this by identifying the best metrics that can describe any route within a graph, in terms of overall throughput, reliability and minimum energy consumption. Simulations were carried out by varying critical factors of mobile devices such as battery reserves, memory and CPU utilisation, and results recorded the effect that this has on the device's overall routing metric. The results presented in this paper show the routing capability of different device types when idle, and identify the threshold values where the device becomes incapable by varying devices' critical factors. Finally, the paper appraises devices' routing performance against known routing traffic scenarios, such as asynchronous, burst and energy efficient, and makes recommendations for the overall route calculation metrics.