Quality of service unicast routing in mobile ad hoc network using metaheuristic approaches: a survey

Quality of Service (QoS) routing is very much challenging issue in Mobile ad hoc Networks (MANETs) compared to wired network due to mobility of nodes, multihop communication, decentralized coordination and contention for channel access. QoS guarantee is essential by many applications like multimedia, real time audio-video and military. QoS parameter varies according to type of applications. In last decades, many researchers have focused on this issue. This problem is a nonlinear combinatorial optimization (CO) problem, which is proved to be a NP-complete problem, at present; the problem can be easily solved by metaheuristic techniques. Previously many metaheuristics have been applied to solve CO problems with Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Genetic Algorithm, Simulated Annealing and Tabu Search. Recently some of the authors have presented survey of routing protocol using these metaheuristics but not specific to quality of service routing. This paper presents the survey of routing protocol which support QoS with different metrics and shown strengths and weaknesses of protocols which allow us to identify the areas of future research.