Statistical QoS Routing for IEEE 802.11 Multihop Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we propose a model-based quality-of-service (QoS) routing scheme for IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks. Unlike most of QoS routing schemes in the literature, the proposed scheme provides stochastic end-to-end delay guarantees, instead of average delay guarantees, to delay-sensitive bursty traffic sources. Via a cross-layer design approach, the scheme selects the routes based on a geographical on-demand ad hoc routing protocol and checks the availability of network resources by using traffic source and link-layer channel modeling, taking into consideration the IEEE 802.11 characteristics and node interactions. Our scheme extends the well developed effective bandwidth theory and its dual effective capacity concept to multihop IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks. Extensive computer simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme is effective in satisfying the end-to-end delay bound to a probabilistic limit.