Cross-layer design for topology control and routing in MANETs

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self-organized and adaptive wireless network formed by dynamically gathering mobile nodes. Since the topology of the network is constantly changing, the issue of routing packets and energy conservation become challenging tasks. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer design that jointly considers routing and topology control taking mobility and interference into account for MANETs. We called the proposed protocol as Mobility-aware Routing and Interference-aware Topology control (MRIT) protocol. The main objective of the proposed protocol is to increase the network lifetime, reduce energy consumption, and find stable end-to-end routes for MANETs. We evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol by comprehensively simulating a set of random MANET environments. The results show that the proposed protocol reduces energy consumption rate, end-to-end delay, interference while preserving throughput and network connectivity. Copyright (c) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.