A Load-Balancing and Push-Out Scheme for Supporting QoS in MANETs

International audienceCurrently, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) lack load-balancing capabilities, and thus, they fail to provide good performance especially in the case of a large volume of traffic. Ad hoc networks lack also service differentiation. However, in these wireless environments, where channel conditions are variable and bandwidth is scarce, the differentiated services developed for the Internet are suboptimal without lower layers' support. The IEEE 802.11 standard for Wireless LANs is the most widely used WLAN standard today. It has a mode of operation that can be used to provide service differentiation, but it has been shown to perform badly. In this paper, we present a simple but very effective method for support Quality of Service, by the use of load-balancing and push-out scheme. This approach offers to the mobile node: the ability to alleviate congestion by traffic distribution of excessive load, and to support priority of packets in the single MAC buffer. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm and compare it with the original IEEE 802.11b protocol. Simulation results show that this new approach reduces packet loss rate and increases throughput as well as provides service differentiation in the MAC layer