Cross-layer enhancement of IEEE 802.11 MAC for mobile ad hoc networks

In mobile ad hoc networks, the large amount of control overheads associated with discovering and maintaining end-to-end routing path information may not be tolerable. In this paper, we present the design and simulation of a new approach for IEEE 802.11 MAC based on the multipath routing information for ad hoc networks. The routing information about multiple paths discovered in the network layer is exploited by the MAC layer in order to forward a frame over the best hop out of multiple hop choices. The performance of our approach is compared with the one of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol via simulation. The results show that our proposed scheme exhibits a remarkable performance improvement over the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol in terms of packet overhead and end-to-end throughput.