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

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.