A CLD approach for intelligent routing in MANETs

The self-organizing wireless Mobile Ad-hoc Networks are characterized by the routing protocols they employ and the wireless technology used by the nodes in those networks. Process of route formation in MANETs is based only on the decision of network layer; resulting in network prone to congestion and degraded performance. Constraints imposed by MAC sub-layer and PHY layer go unnoticed with conventional routing protocols. The variations in medium access delays may get magnified with factors of mobility, interference and increased population of constituent devices. For ease of making the MANET routing protocols aware of the underlying layers' contributing factors and providing a QoS communication, this paper presents a Cross Layer Design approach for enhanced efficiency in MANETs. The proposed scheme enables the inculcation of both PHY and MAC related data to be used as route metric in routing protocols. The QoS conformant IEEE 802.1 le presents four differently prioritized queues on MAC level, set aside for each of the four access categories to uphold priority of service inside the queues. Enabling this traffic prioritization on MAC level along with other delay calculations, the data can be transferred much quicker as a dedicated path is created for each Access Category per destination in the protocol's routing table. Proposed scheme can increase efficiency of VoIP based MANETs such as in Call Admission Control scheme. The proposed scheme is incorporated in AODV routing protocol and simulated in OPNET.