Resource Management in Multi-hop Ad Hoc Networks

An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes dynamically forming a temporary network without the use of any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. Routing protocols have been developed that allow such nodes to communicate, but these protocols typically provide only best-effort service. In particular, they do not provide a way to control the consumption of resources in the network, such as the battery power or the carrying capacity of the nodes. This proposal describes a scheme of path-state and flow-state mechanisms that can used to explicitly manage resources in an ad hoc network, explains how the scheme can be evaluated, and argues for its importance.