Abstract
Over the years, multihop Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are providing cost effective services to the end users such as Video on demand (VoD), Voice over IP (VoIP), and Video conferencing in an efficient manner. Most of these services require an efficient service selection mechanism that can provide Quality of Service (QoS) in presence of various constraints such as delay, jitter, and service availability. In presence of these constraints, multi-constraint QoS aware service selection in WMNs is an NP-hard problem. In this paper, we propose an ant colony based multi constraints QoS aware service selection (QSS) algorithm. In the proposed algorithm, ants are launched from source node. The best path is chosen based upon the defined cost effective (CE) metric in presence of constraints. The constraints are chosen both from network and user perspectives. The goodness of the chosen path is determined by the CE metric. Moreover, ants are not launched randomly from the source node. They are launched based upon the guided search evaluation (GSE) criterion. This criterion is also used if the two paths have the same CE metric. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is more effective than the earlier improved ant colony QoS routing algorithm (IAQR) algorithm with respect to convergence, end-to-end delay (jitter), and service availability. Specifically, the service availability increases by 35-50% in the proposed QoS aware scheme compared to IAQR algorithm. (C) 2011 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.