Non Disruptive Data Services Towards Real-Time Traffic in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile wireless ad hoc networks (MANETs) naturally support a traffic mix of elastic and real-time flows but the shared nature and lossy properties of the radio medium make their coexistence challenging. We argue in this paper for a new kind of elastic data transport service which would preserve the quality of real-time priority flows while guaranteeing an acceptable (tunable) end-to-end delivery time of elastic data. We propose to use mechanisms from Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) to support hop-by-hop data transfer from source to destination and an adaptation of TCP which monitors its aggressiveness towards local VoIP traffic on each hop. The scheme is evaluated in simulation on a simple 4-node scenario and in a more realistic case where doubling data transfer time allows for the support of seven VoIP flows of medium quality against none for standard TCP.