A quality of service aware cross-layer approach for wireless ad hoc networks with smart antennas

Recent technological advances have led to a growing interest in multi-antenna wireless ad hoc networks in which each node has more than one antenna. This paper proposes a cross-layer approach called QoS-aware smart antenna protocol (QSAP) for such networks that assures quality of service (QoS) needs of applications with reduced energy consumption. The proposed scheme adaptively allocates the degrees of freedom present in the multi-antenna system at each node to reduce the transmit energy while meeting the QoS needs of the application. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through simulations. The simulations show that the cross-layer aspects of the proposed approach result in considerable energy savings compared to schemes which meet the QoS needs without the cross-layer interaction.