Performance evaluation of a mesh-evolving quality-of-service-aware multicast routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

The tremendous amount of multimedia applications running across the wireless communication medium makes quality of service (QoS) a fundamental requirement for mobile ad hoc networks. However, it is not easy to incorporate QoS into these networks. Moreover, the growing number of group-oriented applications also necessitates the efficient utilisation of network resources. The multicast model is a promising technique which can achieve this efficiency by facilitating the inherent broadcast capability of the wireless medium. The mesh-evolving ad hoc QoS multicast (MAQM) routing protocol is developed to address the resource efficiency and QoS problems with one, integrated solution. MAQM achieves multicast efficiency by tracking the availability of resources for each node within its neighbourhood. The QoS status is monitored continuously and announced periodically to the extent of QoS provision. Using these features, MAQM nodes can make their decisions on joining a new multicast session based on the sustainability of their perceived QoS. MAQM also evolves the initial multicast tree into a mesh during the course of an ongoing session to achieve a more robust network topology. Thus, MAQM integrates the concept of QoS-awareness into multicast routing in mobile ad hoc networks. Since ad hoc networks require the protocol control overhead to be as small as possible, we analyse the multicast session establishment process of MAQM to see its impact on the protocol performance in terms of system control overhead. We also evaluate the performance of MAQM through computer simulations using various qualitative and quantitative criteria. The simulation results validate our mathematical analysis of the control overhead and show that MAQM significantly improves multicast efficiency through its QoS-aware admission and routing decisions with an acceptably small overhead. Thus, MAQM shows that QoS is not only essential for, but also applicable to mobile ad hoc networks.