Handling local user mobility and QoS in a controlled ad-hoc environment

An increasing number of applications require some form of guarantees from the network, in terms of bandwidth or access and transfer delay. This demand for Quality of Service (QoS) can be met by means of different mechanisms, depending on the networks being traversed. Whereas end-to-end QoS provision is still an open problem, several possibilities now exist in local environments. The paper investigates the capabilities offered by a p2p overlay for distributed bandwidth management in a controlled ad-hoc network. The mechanism proposed allows complementing the functionalities of the IEEE 802.11e protocol, and to enhance them to handle local mobility and dynamic requests for bandwidth.