A cross-layer routing protocol with Quality of service support for flexible deployment in MANETs

In this paper a new proposal to perform QoS routing in Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET) is presented and it relies on paradigms of Quality of service Optimized Link State Routing (QOLSR) protocol. The proposed technique is based on the definition of two different priority levels for traffic flows: high priority level and best effort level. While more classes can be defined, the approach is of interest in fulfilling requirements of challenging scenarios in e.g. tactical or emergency communications and it is not restricted to unicast connections. As a matter of fact, a node can differentiate among traffic flows with different priority levels by assigning them different paths towards the same destination. In case of congestion, the proposed method operates with two routing tables: a Standard Routing Table (SRT) and a Dedicated Routing Table (DRT) for re-routing data traffic flows. Packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay are analyzed for increasing values of number of nodes and traffic injections. Experimental results show a better trend with respect to traditional OLSR scheme.