Cross-layer Designs: A Survey
Md. MohiuddinKhan · International Journal of Computer Applications · 2012
Computer communication has been going through major changes throughout the last decades.While wireless technologies have been widely adopted, various domains and implementations like wireless sensor Networks (WSN), mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), wireless mesh networks have emerged.Since TCP/IP was a protocol designed for wired networks, wireless transmission poses unique challenges to the well-defined and rigid protocol stack.The well-known layers of the OSI model or its practical counterpart TCP/IP model were too strict in some cases to provide with all the services necessitated by these new domains.These issues make way to cross-layer design where the traditional boundaries among layers are violated in different ways to achieve performance gain.In this paper, we gather the motivation behind the cross-layer design, illustrate some representative examples and draw conclusions for the future challenges.