Evaluating the effectiveness of a qos framework for MANETs in a real testbed

Despite all the research efforts in the two previous decades, only a few mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) testbeds have actually been deployed, and even fewer were able to offer Quality of Service (QoS) support. The main problems hindering actual deployment have to do with the distributed effects of mobility, channel contention, and interference. Using simulation or analytical models, several QoS protocols, architectures and algorithms have been presented with the aim of improving QoS support in MANETs. When attempting to translate these research efforts to real testbeds, the difficulty to represent issues like feasibility in real systems, implementation complexity, node deployment and experiment repeatability have prevented their validation. In this paper we present a real implementation of DACME, the QoS framework we propose for mobile ad-hoc networks, and we test its effectiveness in an IEEE 802.11e enabled testbed. Experimental results show that the developed solution is able to achieve good QoS levels, offering sustained bandwidth levels and bounded delay.