Flooding-limited for multi-constrained quality-of-service routing protocol in mobile ad hoc networks

Multi-constrained quality-of-service (QoS) routing is used to find routes in a network to satisfy multiple independent QoS constraints. This problem is considered to be NP-complete, and most existing QoS routing algorithms are based on maintaining a global network state at every node. A multi-constrained, flooding-limited, QoS routing method to deal with limited available resources and minimum computation in a dynamic environment is proposed. The solution is based on decomposition of a routing area and a restriction in the exchange of routing information. It reduces the size of the control messages, restricts the amount of routing information, minimises the overhead from the flooding of control traffic and decreases the complexity of path selection. It is also proved that the flooding-limited-path heuristic can achieve very high performance by maintaining entries in each node, which indicates that the performance of the limited-path heuristic is not sensitive to the number of constraints. Simulation results show that this protocol provides better performance than other protocols, especially with regards to end-to-end delay, throughput and packet loss.