Cross Layer Design for Enhanced Quality Routing in Personal Wireless Networking

With more and more consumer devices becoming capable of wireless communication, the need for good quality ad hoc networking becomes more imminent. Self-configuring and self-adapting multi-hop networking will provide an excellent solution for wireless personal area networks (WPAN) as well as wireless home networks. In such networks, scalability is rarely believed to be a real issue. Instead, the issues are related to the end-to-end quality due to wireless links with constantly and rapidly changing quality. Hence, the network layer not only needs to adapt accurately but also in time. This paper looks into the design of accurate and fast wireless link quality assessment (LQA) options. We investigate the possibility to use cross layer information to improve this process which can be used by the routing layer to adapt faster and more accurately to changing situations. Experiments are done and the result shows the importance of adapting the new LQA options.