Cross layer optimization of dynamic source routing protocol using IEEE 802.11e based medium awareness

The inception of multimedia applications Mobile Ad-hoc Networks has created multi-disciplinary challenges for researchers in the field of network engineering. These applications on one hand consume extensive bandwidth and battery power and on the other hand require special treatment by the network entities to experience minimum delay by the traffic they generate. Due to some inherited limitations in MANET like low processing capabilities and limited transmission power the multimedia traffic will require careful attention to route along the network from the source to destination. The legacy Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol was designed in 1994 for simple data transmission. For transmission of multimedia traffic over DSR, many newer schemes are proposed in the last decade to meet the quality of service requirements. However the proposed scheme in this paper utilizes the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) based medium access mechanism as defined in IEEE 802.11E standard. The EDCA works on the principle of traffic prioritization into four access categories, thus allowing higher priority traffic more chances to access medium and transmit on the network. The proposed scheme uses cross layer technique to take EDCA parameters from the MAC layer on real time and calculate routing metric. OPNET Modeler is used to implement the scheme and evaluate results. The performance comparison shows the significance of the proposed scheme over the standard DSR routing.