Cross layer design for service differentiation in mobile ad hoc networks

Cross layer design is a promising approach in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) to combat the fast time-varying characteristics of wireless links, network topology, and application traffic. In this paper, we employ cross layer design to develop a novel-scheduling scheme with two optimisations aimed at service differentiation. The scheduling scheme is executed at the network layer of every station according to the channel conditions estimated by the MAC layer. The optimizations are based on traffic property sharing and packet timeout period interaction to reduce the packet collisions and improve network performance. We evaluate the proposed scheme under different network loads in terms of packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay and delay jitter. The simulation results show that our scheme can provide different service differentiations for time-bounded and best effort traffics. In particular, we can guarantee the delay and delay jitter requirements of time-bounded traffic.