Efficient Integration of the Multicast Routing Protocol and the Reliable MAC Protocol for MANETs

Protocols of different layers in the protocol stack are usually designed separately. However, we observe that simple integration of MAC and network layers in the MANETs may result in inferior performance especially under heavy traffic. We exemplify this using Adaptive Round-robin Acknowledge and Retransmit (ARAR) for the MAC layer and the Gateway-Based Multicast Protocol (GBMP) for the network layer. In order to have a smooth and efficient integration, we propose a Queue Splitting (QS) mechanism, which splits the queue in-between the MAC and routing layer, into two queues, the Control Queue and the Default Queue. A priority scheduling is used at the MAC layer, which alleviates the congestion and improves the performance substantially.