Most of the current existing MANET routing protocols will select the shortest path route to a destination. In principle, this minimizes the number of transmissions, and reduces the packet delay. However, practically, there are other parameters that could be considered when finding a route to a destination, such as available bandwidth of different links along the way, nodes remaining battery life, etc. If a variable bit rate MAC layer like 802.11 is used, choosing the shortest path often has the consequence that the path with the lowest bit rate links is chosen (because the link communication range is larger at lower bit rate and because multicast frames, such as routing control messages, uses low bit rates).

Research has been conducted on cost-based routing using the OLSR routing protocol where it was acquiring radio idle time information from the MAC. Extensive simulations were done in this area, and a real test bed implementation was achieved. We are currently designing and implementing an approach where the routing is based on the intermediate nodes remaining battery life, links bandwidth as well as number of hops to a destination. This requires interlayer protocol interactions.

Papers:

• Y.Ge, T.Kunz, L.Lamont, "Quality of Service routing in ad-hoc networks using OLSR", The 36th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-36), Hawaii, USA, January 2003.
  
  
• Y.Ge, T.Kunz, L.Lamont ,"Proactive QoS Routing in Ad-Hoc Networks", 2nd International Conference on Ad-Hoc Networks and Wireless, Montreal, Canada, October 8-10, 2003.