A cross-layer metric for application-constrained MAC-aware capacity optimization

This paper introduces a new cross-layer design metric called Application-Constrained MAC-Aware Capacity (ACMAC). ACMAC considers outage capacity, MAC layer and application layer Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements to derive the lower and upper bounds of the transmission rate. Theoretical derivation of this metric demonstrates the importance of considering different layers of the network. Further, we show how to use ACMAC as a cross layer optimization criterion to generate frameworks for selecting different parameters such as transmit rate, channel or route selection in wireless networks. Our simulation results show that ACMAC is very accurate in predicting network performance such as throughput while satisfying QoS parameters like Packet Error rate (PER).