Impact of IEEE 802.11e EDCA on AODV Routing Protocol in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

With Easy and fast deployment of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), the capability of MANET to support real time services with constricted quality of service requirements has come ahead. The IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) mechanism concede prioritized medium access for applications with high QoS requirements by assigning different priorities to its four access categories. In this paper we expose results relative to the interaction of AODV routing protocol for MANETs and the IEEE 802.11e EDCA mechanism. The performance is evaluated under real time audio traffic through simulation using OPNET modeler 14.0. The performance of protocol is measured in terms of various quality of service measures including hops per route, route discovery time, delay and throughput are calculated and graphs has been plotted. Simulation results show that very substantial improvements in terms of AODV performance parameters and minimum delay are achieved due to increased routing responsiveness.