Multi-hop Cross-Layer Design in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Case Study

Cross-layer design has been proposed as a promising paradigm to tackle various problems of wireless communication systems. Recent research has led to a variety of protocols that rely on intensive interaction between different layers of the classical layered OSI protocol architecture. These protocols involve different layers and introduce new ideas how layers shall communicate and interact. In existing cross-layer approaches, the violation of the OSI architecture typically consists in passing information between different adjacent or non-adjacent layers of one single station´s protocol stack to solve an optimization problem and exploiting the dependencies between the layers. This paper proposes to go a step further and to consider cross-layer information exchange across different layers of multiple stations involved in multi-hop communication systems. It outlines possible application scenarios of this approach, and trades off between advantages and disadvantages of the proposed emph {multi-hop cross-layer design}. It examines an application scheme in a scenario of a wireless sensor network environment operating with a recent energy-efficient power saving protocol.