Load balancing QoS multicast routing protocol in mobile ad hoc networks

Recently, multimedia and group-oriented computing become increasingly popular for the users of ad hoc networks. The study of QoS issues in MANETs is vital for supporting multimedia and real-time applications. MANETs can provide multimedia users with mobility they demand, if efficient QoS multicasting strategies were developed. In this paper, we study QoS requirements, illustrate advantages and limitations of existing QoS routing protocol and propose a QoS Multicast Routing protocol (QMR) with a flexible hybrid scheme for QoS multicast routing. The hybrid scheme contains some mechanisms that provide fix-reservation and shared-reservation bandwidth to guarantee QoS multicast routing. The proposed protocol uses forward nodes to apply QoS multicast routing from source(s) to a group of destinations and support load balancing. Analysis results show the ability of QMR to exploit residual bandwidth efficiently without effect on the reserved bandwidth and provide a balance between performance gains and design complexity.