Patent ID: 7079552

Claim:
A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) comprising: a plurality of mobile nodes each comprising a wireless communications device and a controller connected thereto; said controller operating in accordance with a multi-layer protocol hierarchy for, at an application layer, establishing a quality-of-service (QoS) threshold from among a plurality of different possible QoS thresholds based upon a type of given data to be transmitted to at least one destination node; at a QoS support layer below the application layer, determining whether to require data reception acknowledgements based upon the QoS threshold; at a QoS coding layer below the QoS support layer, encoding data from the application layer for transmission to the at least one destination mobile node; at a QoS route selection layer below the QoS coding layer, selecting at least one route to the at least one destination mobile node based upon the QoS threshold; at a QoS traffic layer below the QoS route selection layer, controlling data traffic flow based upon the QoS threshold; and at at least one lower protocol layer below the Qos traffic layer, cooperating with said wireless communications device to transmit the given data to the at least one destination mobile node via the at least one selected route.