ECLAIR: An Efficient Cross Layer Architecture for Wireless Protocol Stacks

Seamless mobility across heterogeneous mobile wireless technologies is now essential as mobile subscribers demand full and cost-effective wireless network coverage. Under such mobility conditions the layered protocol stack is inefficient. Significant research has been done for cross layer optimizations of the protocol stack. To enable rapid deployment of existing and new cross layer optimizations an architecture for cross layer optimizations is essential. In this paper, we present our architecture ECLAIR which can serve as a blueprint for development of cross layer feedback systems. ECLAIR consists of two main components – optimization subsystem and tuning layers.The optimization subsystem contains protocol optimizers that effectuate cross layer optimizations. The protocol optimizers interact with the existing stack through the tuning layers. In ECLAIR we exploit the fact that stack behavior is determined by the values stored in various protocol data structures. Our architecture facilitates easy manipulation of these values stored in the protocol data structures. To the best of our knowledge, ECLAIR is the first generic architecture for cross layer feedback.