Fairness in multihop ad hoc networks has received considerable attention in the literature. A plethora of protocols have been proposed, which compute the ``optimal'' bit rates of the transmitting mobile nodes over short time-scales so that a certain fairness criterion is met. However, there has been limited research on the impact of the varying short-term allocations of these protocols due to nodes mobility on the user-perceived QoS (and social welfare) for services of long duration. In this paper, we introduce a utility-based framework, based on {\em QoS-aware history-dependent} utility functions. These functions quantify the satisfaction that the users of the MANETs obtain from the way their long-lived service sessions are allocated bandwidth, due to the behavior of the fairness protocols proposed for ad hoc networks. Finally, we demonstrate the framework's usefulness, by performing a comparative assessment of the fairness protocol of our previous work with the standard IEEE 802.11.