Cross-layer design and optimisation for wireless sensor networks

Cross-layer design and optimisation is a new technique which can be used to design and improve the performance in both wireless and wireline networks. The central idea of cross-layer design is to optimise the control and exchange of information over two or more layers to achieve significant performance improvements by exploiting the interactions between various protocol layers. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer design and optimisation framework and the concept of using an Optimisation Agent (OA) to provide the exchange and control of information between the various protocol layers to improve the performance in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The approach is to investigate the effects of the wireless channel and the physical layer performance of a small-scale WSN to develop insights that can be used in the design and development of the OA in the proposed cross-layer framework.