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Pervasive Communications Handbook

reserved along multiple paths; however, only one is used as the primary path while
others serve as backup paths. In the third level of redundancy, multiple paths are
selected, but resources are only reserved on the primary path. The path-repairing
mechanism tries to avoid the cost of re-routing by attempting to repair the route at the
point of failure. Ticket-based probing is proposed as a general QoS routing approach
for MANETs and can handle different QoS constraints (i.e., bandwidth, delay, packet
loss, and jitter). For example, ticket-based QoS routing solutions for the bandwidth and
delay-constrained routing problems were presented in [14].
In [14], backup paths for maintenance of the routing paths when nodes move, join, or
leave the network are also used. The proposed algorithms require that each node knows
(with some imprecision) the delay and bandwidth on the least delay and largest bandwidth paths to any possible destination. Thus, in effect, each node should maintain the
states of all links in the network, which requires a quadratic communication overhead
for the state updates. Figure 4.3 shows an example of how source uses three probes p1, p2,
and p3 to find a path to the target D. When one or more probe(s) arrive(s) at the destination node, the hop-by-hop path is known and delay/bandwidth information can be used
to perform resource reservation for the QoS satisfying path.
In wireline networks, a probability distribution can be calculated for a path, based on
the delay and bandwidth information. In MANETs, however, building such probability
distribution is not difficult and not feasible. This is because of the fact that wireless links
are subject to breakage at any time and state information of link and network topology
is imprecise in nature. Hence, a simple model that provides information about the state
of the network, although still imprecise, is needed. Such a model was proposed in the

p1(2)

p1(2)
p2(1)
p2(1)

p1(2)

p2(1)

p2(1)
p2(1)

p6(1)
p1(2)

p3(2)

p2(1)
p4(1)

p4(1)

p1(2)
p7(1)

p4(1)
p4(1)

D
p5(1)

p5(1)

p5(1)
p5(1)

FIGURE 4.3 Source S uses three probes p1, p2, p3 with the number of tickets each probe has been
given between parentheses. p3 is further split to two probes p4 and p5 at node x.