Thulani Phakathi, Bukohwo Michael Esiefarienrhe and Francis Lugayizi, North-West University, South Africa

Quality of Service (QoS) is now regarded as a requirement for all networks in managing resources like bandwidth and avoidance of network impairments like packet loss, jitter, and delay. Media transfer or streaming would be virtually impossible if QoS parameters were not used even if the streaming protocols were perfectly designed. QoS Scheduling classes help in network traffic optimization and the priority management of packets. This paper presents an analysis of QoS scheduling classes using video traffic in a MANET. The main objective was to identify a scheduling class that provides better QoS for video streaming. A simulation was conducted using NetSim and results were analyzed according to throughput, jitter, and delay. The overall results showed that extended real-time Polling Service (ertPS) outperformed the other classes. ertPS has hybrid features of both real-time Polling Service (rtPS) and Unsolicited Grant Service(UGS) hence the enhanced performance. It is recommended that ertPS scheduling class should be used in MANET where QoS consideration is utmost particularly in multimedia streaming applications.

Routing protocols, MANETs, Scheduling, QoS in MANET, rtPS protocol.