An admission control mechanism for dynamic QoS-enabled opportunistic routing protocols

Abstract

Opportunistic routing has gained much attention as a new and promising approach to relay packets in wireless mesh networks. The collaboration of intermediate nodes to deliver packets without a predetermined route, using the broadcast nature of wireless channel, increases the transmission reliability and network throughput. Nevertheless, such characteristics make the process of admission control even more challenging than in a traditional unipath routing protocol. In this paper, we propose an admission control mechanism for quality of service (QoS)-enabled opportunistic routing protocols. This mechanism performs admission control and resource reservation in multiple neighbors according to their importance for the relaying process. We also consider the influence of using thresholds for QoS parameters in order to improve the service provided to adaptive applications. Simulation results allow us to reach two conclusions: (i) the proposed mechanism achieves higher success rate than both a unipath-based and a multipath-based admission control mechanisms and (ii) thresholds allow high resource reservation even in network topologies with scarce resources.