A route-control mechanism for improving the performance of transport protocols in a MANET

We propose a new cross-layer mechanism, referred to as route-control, for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). This mechanism, which works in the network and transport layers, aims at enhancing the performance of MANETs´ reliable transport protocols. The main idea behind the proposed mechanism is to notify the sender when the packets of a Transport layer flow change their route. We show that the sender can benefit from this information when deciding whether to retransmit a missing segment or to wait, when estimating the RTT (Round Trip Time), and when deciding whether to change the congestion window.