Distributed flow admission control for multimedia services over wireless ad hoc networks

In this paper we propose a novel Priority-based Distributed flow Admission Control (PDAC) protocol to provide Quality of Service (QoS) to multimedia applications over the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol-based wireless ad hoc networks. In contrast to short-term packet forwarding, medium and long-term multimedia and real-time traffic may benefit from 'flow'-based transmission due to the reduction in the packet-level control overhead. In this paper, we introduce a new DSR option called the "Admission Control Option" for flow establishment, and present a new scalable transmission rate reservation protocol to support bandwidth-constrained traffic flows in interference-limited wireless ad hoc networks. It allows a node in the wireless ad hoc network to establish or discard a traffic flow state based on the global knowledge of traffic flow priority, and local knowledge in the form of interference and effective transmission rate. The PDAC scheme can also operate in a 'cross-layer' protocol architecture that encompasses the network layer and the MAC layer.