Bundled Virtual Circuit: A Proposed Cross Layer Design of Routing and Scheduling for QoS Services in MANETs

To meet the needs of QoS requirement of multimedia traffic in wireless networks, IEEE 802.11e protocol has been proposed as an upcoming standard. The medium access control (MAC) layer of 802.11e has provided QoS support through priority scheduling for different types of traffic. However, the 802.11e QoS mechanism has an impact on the higher layers i.e. network layer and create new issues that need to be considered seriously. For example, there exists a path correlation between different data types especially when they share a common link in the network layer. Under high traffic load, the correlation effect will cause many re-route procedures for paths which are shared by different data types as lower priority traffic is likely to be blocked. Such re-route procedure will downgrade the QoS service for the high priority traffic as the common link is broken for all traffic. To break the correlation effect, in this paper, we propose a cross-layer scheme called: bundled virtual circuit to deal with the scheduling and routing in MANET. The key feature of BVC is taking in account of the influence of priority scheduling in MAC layer when designing routing scheme at the network layer. The proposed scheme could provide better QoS service for MANET with 802.11e from simulation results