Adaptive Quality of Service in ad hoc wireless networks

In high criticality crisis scenarios, such as disaster management, ad hoc wireless networks are quickly assembled in the field to support decision makers through situational awareness using messaging-, voice-, and video-based applications. These applications cannot afford the luxury of stalling or failing due to overwhelming bandwidth demand on these networks as this could contribute to overall mission failure. This paper describes an approach for satisfying application-specific Quality of Service (QoS) expectations operating on ad hoc wireless networks where available bandwidth fluctuates. The proposed algorithm, D-Q-RAM (Distributed QoS Resource Allocation Model) incorporates a distributed optimization heuristic that results in near optimal adaptation without the need to know, estimate, or predict available bandwidth at any moment in time.