QoS Routing Protocols in MANETs - A Review

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is an autonomous amalgamation of mobile nodes that form a dynamic network and communicating over wireless links. Owing to its unique abilities such as easy deployment and self-organizing capability, it has shown enormous potential in many applications. As MANETs popularity is increasing, their need to facilitate real time and multimedia applications is growing as well. Such applications have Quality of Service (QoS) requirements such as bandwidth, end-to-end delay, jitter and energy. Consequently, it is becoming very necessary for MANETs to have an efficient routing and QoS mechanism to facilitate these applications. There are several number of QoS routing protocols with distinguishing features that have been proposed recently. This paper presents a detailed overview of some of the QoS routing protocols along with their respective strengths and flaws. A comparative study of the QoS routing protocols is done and future prospects are also presented.