A Study on Cross Layer MAC design for performance optimization of routing protocols in MANETs

Abstract

One of the most visible trends in today’s commercial communication market is the adoption of wireless technology. Wireless networks are expected to carry traffic that will be a mix of real time traffic such as voice, multimedia conferences, games and data traffic such as web browsing, messaging and file transfer. All of these applications require widely varying and very diverse Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. In an effort to improve the performance of wireless networks, there has been increased interest in protocols that rely on interactions between different layers. Cross-Layer Design has become the new issue in wireless communication systems as it seeks to enhance the capacity of wireless networks significantly through the joint optimization of multiple layers in the network. Wireless multi-hop ad-hoc networks have generated a lot of interest in the recent past due to their many potential applications. Multi-hopping implies the existence of many geographically distributed devices that share the wireless medium which creates the need for efficient MAC and routing protocols to mitigate interference and take full advantage of spatial reuse. Cross-Layer Design is an emerging proposal to support flexible layer approaches in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs). In this paper, we present few Cross-Layer MAC design proposals by analyzing the ongoing research activities in this area for optimizing the performance of routing protocols in MANETs.