EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking
Volume 2005 (2005), Article ID 165378, 16 pages
doi:10.1155/WCN.2005.645

A Cross-Layer Route Discovery Framework for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Bosheng Zhou,1 Alan Marshall,1 Jieyi Wu,2 Tsung-Han Lee,1 and Jiakang Liu1

1Advanced Telecommunication Systems Laboratory, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Queen's University of Belfast, Stranmillis Road, Belfast BT9 5AH, Ireland
2Research Center of Computer Integrated Manufactural System (CIMS), Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China

Received 11 June 2004; Revised 12 May 2005

Copyright © 2005 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Most reactive routing protocols in MANETs employ a random delay between rebroadcasting route requests (RREQ) in order to avoid “broadcast storms.” However this can lead to problems such as “next hop racing” and “rebroadcast redundancy.” In addition to this, existing routing protocols for MANETs usually take a single routing strategy for all flows. This may lead to inefficient use of resources. In this paper we propose a cross-layer route discovery framework (CRDF) to address these problems by exploiting the cross-layer information. CRDF solves the above problems efficiently and enables a new technique: routing strategy automation (RoSAuto). RoSAuto refers to the technique that each source node automatically decides the routing strategy based on the application requirements and each intermediate node further adapts the routing strategy so that the network resource usage can be optimized. To demonstrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of CRDF, we design and evaluate a macrobian route discovery strategy under CRDF.