A Route-Control Mechanism for Improving the Performance of Transport Protocols in a MANET

We propose a new cross-layer mechanism, referred to as Route-control, for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). This mechanism, which works in the Network and Transport layers, aims at enhancing the performance of MANETs' reliable Transport protocols. The main idea behind the proposed mechanism is to notify the sender when the packets of a Transport layer flow change their route. We show that the sender can benefit from this information when deciding whether to retransmit a missing segment or to wait, when estimating the RTT (Round Trip Time), and when deciding whether to change the congestion window.