Integrating Stability Estimation into Quality of Service Routing in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

One of the notoriously difficult problems in quality of service (QoS) routing in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) is to ensure that the established path for a connection does not break before the end of the data transmission. This paper addresses the issue of reducing path breakage during data transmission, even if geographic location information is not available. Using delay-constrained QoS routing as an example, we propose a novel algorithm that we call ticket-based probing with stability estimation (TBP-SE) as an enhancement for the multi-path distributed QoS routing scheme proposed in Chen, S et al. (1999). Models are created to estimate relative link and path stability. During path discovery, the estimated relative stability is used to direct tickets along paths featuring high stability. Among multiple detected paths, the one with the highest relative stability is selected. Through extensive simulations, we show that our algorithm significantly improves the stability of established paths in terms of average relative path stability, path breakage speed, and percentage of data transmissions completed before path breakage