The Effects of Physical Layer on the Routing Wireless Protocol

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are characterized by multiple entities, a frequently changing network topology and the need for efficient dynamic routing protocols. In MANETs, nodes are usually powered by batteries. Power control is tightly coupled with both the physical and medium access layers (MACs). However, if we increase the transmission power, at the same time we increase the interference to other nodes which diminish the transport capacity of wireless systems. Thus, the routing protocols based on hop count metric suffer from performance degradation when they operate over MANET. Routing in ad hoc wireless networks is not only a problem of finding a route with shortest length, but it is also a problem of finding a stable and good quality communication route in order to avoid any unnecessary packet loss. Cross-layer design of ad hoc wireless networks has been receiving increasing attention recently. Part of these researches suggests that routing should take into account physical layer characteristics. The goal of this paper is to improve the routing reliability in MANET and to reduce power consumption through cross-layer approach among physical, MAC and network layers. The proposed cross-layer approach is based on signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) and received signal strength indication (RSSI) coming from the physical layer. This solution performs in one hand the ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing protocol by choosing reliable routes with less interferences using SINR metric and in another hand; it permits to reduce the power transmission when sending the data packets by using RSSI metric.