Testing an Admission Control Module for MANETs in real devices

Despite all the research efforts in the two previous decades, only a few mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) have been actually 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 these environments; specifically, several works address admission control mechanisms since these are fundamental to provide QoS support in ad-hoc networks. When attempting to translate these research efforts to real testbeds, though, 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, our distributed admission control system for mobile ad-hoc networks. We test its effectiveness in an IEEE 802.11e enabled testbed, and the experimental results show that the solution developed is able to achieve good QoS levels, offering sustained bandwidth levels and bounded delay. Keywords— Quality of Service; MANETs; testbed; distributed admission control; performance evaluation.