Priority Based Fairness Provisioning QoS-Aware MAC Protocol

Abstract

This paper studies the issues of channel allocation subject to QoS constraint(s) and fairness issues in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). While a solution to the hidden-terminal problem is paramount, a QoS- aware Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol must also provide a channel access mechanism that considers the QoS constraints of real-time flows. We propose a new MAC protocol called PFQAMP (Priority based Fairness provisioning QoS-Aware MAC Protocol) which supports QoS for real-time applications and provides fairness in accessing the channel. Nodes are assigned priorities dynamically based on i) their roles as sender, receiver or forwarding node and ii) type of the traffic they have to forward or send. Our approach ensures both QoS (through differentiating traffic types) and fairness (among the traffic in the same class). This leads to better network throughput, lower delay and avoidance of starvations for same priority traffic flow. Through simulation we show that our proposal outperforms IEEE 802.11 in terms of average throughput, delay and fairness.