Patent ID: 7764617

Claim:
A method for communicating between a source node and a destination node in a mobile ad-hoc network comprising a plurality of intermediate nodes between the source node and the destination node, the method comprising: transmitting a quality-of-service (QoS) route request from the source node to the destination node via the plurality of intermediate nodes to discover routing to the destination node based upon a plurality of QoS parameters; transmitting a route request reply from the destination node to the source node; determining a plurality of potential routes between the source node and the destination node and a QoS metric corresponding to each of the QoS parameters for each potential route responsive to the QoS route request, the QoS metric comprising a QoS delay-sensitive path metric, a QoS capacity allocation metric, and a cluster metric; ranking the QoS parameters in an order of importance; weighting each of the QoS metrics based upon the ranking of QoS parameters; comparing the weighted QoS metrics and selecting one of the potential routes based thereon; and transmitting message data from the source node to the destination node via the selected route.