A CROSS-LAYER DESIGN SOLUTION FOR IMPROVING PERFORMANCE OF WIRELESS AD-HOC NETWORKS

Cross-layer design has become one of the most attractive hypes in wireless communication research. In the wake of shortfalls of TCP/IP and packet switched networking in delivering wireless network demands, numerous research groups have turned their attention to finding viable solutions to alleviate some of those shortcomings. Most of those solutions propose new cross-layer designs with fundamental changes to the original architecture. In this paper we examine current research activities in the area of cross-layer design. New solutions propose restructuring the protocol stack by creating new types of layers or combining several layers into a super-layer. New designs are implemented by creating new interfaces between non-adjacent layers in the stack, or implementing data structures like heaps instead of stack. In this paper we introduced some commonly used strategies for cross-layer design and implementation. We employed one of the strategies called coupling between Link and Network layer design, and implemented a direct communication between those layers in Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol. We implemented our solution using Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) in OPNET modeler. In our solution we allowed Mobile Nodes (MNs) in MANET to provide throughput information directly to the routing, and show by simulation that such information could improve delay performance in MANET.