Comparative Review of new QoS-Aware Clustering Protocols for Efficient Routing in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Due to the infracrtureless nature of MANETs, some of their fundamental characteristics such as wireless medium, dynamic topology, collision and interference events, decentralized management, and distributed cooperation between nodes always influence its overall performance as various problems such as the Quality of Service provision’s degradation, higher error rates, various constraints related to bandwidth, power and applications-related issues are frequently associated with them. To contain all those constraints, various algorithms and protocols have been developed mainly aiming at satisfying the users and applications’ requirements in providing high QoS in order to achieve the overall network’s performance. Clustering is one approach toward dealing with those MANET’s routing-related problems, but due to its unstable nature, it is sometimes difficult for protocols specialized in clustering techniques to divide the network into clusters in conjunction with their Cluster-Head selection criterion. Various clustering mechanism have been proposed in the literature such as QAMACF (QoS-Aware transmission for Multimedia applications using Ant Colony with Fuzzy optimization), a protocol implemented based on Ant Colony Optimization and Fuzzy Logic techniques, GDAQM (Genetic with DPD for Attaining high QoS in MANETs), a very efficient and robust algorithm which is a combination of both Genetic and MDPD-k scheduling algorithms, MARMAQS (Multi-Algorithm Routing Mechanism for Acquiring high Quality of Service in MANET), a routing mechanism very effective in achieving high QoS in term of highly increased transmission’s reliability, network’s lifetime, packet delivery ratio, throughput, and decreased both end-to-end delay’s ratio and routing overhead, FSR-CAES (Full-Featured Secure Routing Clustering Algorithm with Energy-Aware and Scheduling capabilities for highly increasing QoS in MANET), an efficient clustering technique which is a combination of numerous algorithms, each one containing one of the previously mentioned problems. All those QoS routing algorithms share almost the same goal; achieving high QoS especially in transmitting multimedia data over MANETs, each one having its own features, enhancements, and achievements. The clustering scheme they use achieves high scalability in the presence of large networks with speedy nodes. As the comparative analysis and evaluation of these protocols has never been conducted; this paper aims to provide a systematic analysis of each QoS protocol by presenting each algorithm’s detailed features, their comparative evaluation using various prominent QoS provision techniques is then provided.