Ad hoc networks, which have seen drastic increase in their usage scenarios and convergence of different applications' traffic lately, are getting ready to support QoS and secure traffic. Existing protocols for ad hoc networks provide little or no support for QoS and security. We present a new routing protocol 'CRESQ' for ad hoc networks, with adequate support for QoS using resource reservation. Ad hoc networks pose certain unique challenges for QoS implementation, in addition to those presented by the wireline and wireless scenarios where resource reservation, high speed of the mobile nodes, and frequent hand-offs from the base-stations are the issues. Additional challenges in ad hoc networks are attributed to mobility of intermediate nodes, absence of routing infrastructure and, low bandwidth and computational capacity of the nodes. The proposed protocol 'CRESQ' takes all these limitations into account and provides a general framework for implementation of QoS. CRESQ, which is a cluster based routing protocol, effectively uses the clustering to minimize the routing overhead and to provide QoS guarantees. CRESQ is a source routing protocol, with an ability for localized route recovery to minimize route and QoS re-establishment delay. Simulations have shown that CRESQ performs considerably better than the existing protocols, in terms ofpacket drop ratio and routing overhead.
