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Pervasive Communications Handbook

thedestination. The protocol also uses multiple paths to account for the imprecision of
the link state and to increase the probability to find a feasible path. The protocol can
handle various QoS routing problems in a unified framework. It can be applied to various QoS routing problems including the minimal delay routing, least cost routing,
bandwidth-constrained, or delay-constrained least cost routing. The route search algorithm is modified from the k-shortest path algorithm and the limited path Dijkstras
algorithm. The protocol uses segmented reactive path discovery to find feasible QoS
path from group togroup. The link state is updated periodically only within each LG or
backbone group (LG or BG) in an attempt to reduce the control overhead. Each backbone has the membership information of its LG and broadcasts this information periodically within the BG, and hence each backbone has the BG and all LG membership
information. The reactive routing protocol is composed of the two main mechanisms of
Path Discovery and Path Maintenance. Each node performs the neighbor discovery
and the topology broadcast tasks. Neighbor discovery is implemented by exchanging
hello message periodically. It is used for a node to identify its neighbors and update its
local link state of all its outgoing links. Topology broadcast of a node is used to advertise
its local link state to its group. Each node has the link state information of its LG and a
backbone has both the link state information of its LG and the BG. Although the results
of this protocol seem promising, the clustering algorithm used to construct MBN is not
efficient. Moreover, the link state can be easily outdated or become imprecise and the
protocol will suffer from high overhead in this case.
In [38], a simple end-to-end QoS routing mechanism in a physical hierarchical environment is proposed. The algorithm operates an end-to-end signaling at each level of the hierarchy (assumed two levels in this paper) for efficient and scalable QoS route construction
and maintenance (see Figure 4.9). Nodes are organized into different interconnected
domains, called mobile groups, and the nodes have reference point group mobility (RPGM).
In the RPGM, each mobile group has a logical mobility center, which is a reference point (or
leader node) that follows the group movement. The movement of leader node represents the
motion of the group, including location, speed, direction and acceleration, and so on. The
other nodes (normal nodes) are uniformly positioned within the group. All the nodes

Leader node

Level-2
Level-1

Normal node

Mobile group
Inter-domain communication
Intra-domain communication

FIGURE 4.9 A physically hierarchical ad hoc network.