Collision´s issue: Towards a new approach to quantify and predict the bandwidth losses

This paper is focused on the QoS (Quality of Service) in IEEE 802.11-based MANETs (Mobile Ad hoc Networks). The QoS support like in any network is relied to manage its resources while having the ability to quantify their availability. The bandwidth is the crucial resource in MANETs, since it is very limited and widely requested; this is why it should be optimally managed. However, estimating its availability is still an open issue to research. Several projects have been conducted to provide new techniques to measure the availability of that resource in such networks. However, performance in accuracy terms while keeping the coexistence with QoS solutions is still not reached. Collisions which are the basic criterion of such networks having a great impact on bandwidth resource are neglected. In this paper we disclose the importance of the taking into account this criterion and we will propose a novel approach improving the measurements by quantifying the bandwidth losses due to collisions: IBEC (Improved Bandwidth Estimations by considering the Collisions). The comparative results with bandwidth estimation methods in the literature testify the improvement brought by this approach.