A Novel Cross-Layer Architecture for Wireless Protocol Stacks

The central idea of cross-layer design is to optimize the control and exchange of information over multiple layers to achieve significant performance improvements by exploiting the interactions between various protocol layers. In order to maintain the advantages of the existing layered architecture and to preserve the modularity of protocol stacks to the great extent possible, a novel cross-layer design, where information exchanged by sharing global network status and optimization controlled outside of protocol stacks, is proposed in this paper. The information manager, combined with the local connector and the adaptation adaptor, standardizes the interface to access the internal state of a protocol data structure and manipulates the global network status for cross layer interactions. The optimization coordinate controller separates the optimization algorithms from the existing protocol stack and actively schedules the optimization process. These two components are incorporated into a unified cross layer optimization framework.