Type of service aware routing protocol in mixed traffic mobile ad-hoc networks

Although several congestion aware routing protocols have been proposed for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) over the last decade, the effect of the different traffic types has not been considered in any routing protocol. Distinguishing different types of traffic that each node deals with in QoS-aware MANETs and responding to routing protocol requests correspondingly can potentially increase the performance of routing protocols and the whole network. This paper explores the effect the type of traffic generated or routed by intermediate nodes has on the performance of routing protocols. We then propose type of service aware (TSA) and type of service and load aware routing protocol (TSLA), two enhancements to AODV that consider the ToS of the traffic nodes in their route selection process. Our simulation study reveals that our schemes considerably improve the throughput and packet delay of both low and high priority traffic under different network operational conditions.