Quality of Service (QoS) -aware handover procedure for Ad-Hoc networks

摘要

The invention targets at a QoS-aware handover procedure in a typical dynamic mobile ad-hoc scenario (cf. Figs. 23 to 27) wherein the connectivity of fixed (AR1, AR2, CN) and/or mobile nodes (MN, M1, M2, M3, M4, EN1, EN2) is unpredictably time-varying and, due to the mobility of mobile nodes, handovers will inevitably frequently occur. Thereby, resources are pre-allocated along potential routing paths in advance, and the flow traffic is redirected to the path having the best available QoS capabilities. According to the new QoS situation of the selected path, adaptive real-time applications can have the opportunity to individually adjust traffic generation. With this concept, packet loss can be avoided and degradation effects on the running real-time application during the QoS-aware handover can be minimized. The QoS-aware handover procedure comprises the steps of handover candidates selection, handover initiation, QoS metrics probing and resource pre-allocation (soft reservation), QoS metrics collection, handover decision, handover confirmation (hard reservation), and reservation release.;In particular, the proposed solution thereby pertains to a method for proactively probing the QoS situation of each potential routing path, pre-allocating resources along the best available QoS path before the handover of the QoS data flow to be transmitted to a new access point (AP) is initiated, providing efficient resource reservation management and maintenance within the underlying mobile ad-hoc networks and incorporating advanced QoS support features offered by adaptive real-time applications. The invention further proposes an "information dissemination" approach, which optimizes prior-art address resolution mechanisms.