Cross layered adaptive cooperative routing mode in mobile ad hoc networks

A Cooperative communication technique has gained considerable attention in the recent time to improve the quality of service (QoS) of ad hoc networks. Cooperative communication significantly improves link capacity through physical layer technique, and spatial diversity gain is achieved by using neighboring nodes to retransmit the overheard information to the intended destination node. However, upper layer protocols are not elegantly designed to adequately exploit the spatial diversity to improve overall network performance in ad hoc networks. Limiting the cooperation to one network layer may not be the best solution. Thus, in this paper, we intend to achieve multilayer functionality from physical layer to the routing layer to provide cooperative communication. An adaptive cross layered cooperative routing algorithm (ACCR) is proposed to analyze the channel state variations and selectively choose the cooperative MAC scheme on demand by exploiting spatial diversity. The algorithm dynamically selects best relay candidates based on QoS metric, contention delay and node energy fairness. Network layer, then chooses an optimized path from source to destination through the selected relay nodes. We validate the algorithm with extensive simulations. The results clearly show that cooperative cross-layer design approach effectively improves the average throughput and average delay for each packet transmission.