—Providing quality-of-service (QoS) assurances in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is difficult due to node mobility, contention for channel access, a lack of centralised coordination, and the unreliable nature of the wireless channel. QoS-aware routing (QAR) and admission control (AC) protocols comprise two of the most important components of a system attempting to provide QoS guarantees in the face of the above-mentioned difficulties. Many QAR and ACbased solutions have been proposed, but such network layer schemes are often designed and studied with idealised lower layer models in mind. This means that existing solutions are not designed for dealing with practical phenomena such as shadow fading and the link quality-dependent fluctuation of link transmission rates. This paper presents a comparative study, utilising a realistic shadow fading channel, of the performance of several state-of-the-art QAR and AC protocols, which are designed for providing throughput guarantees to appl...