A routing protocol for multi-rate wireless ad-hoc networks: Cross layer approach

This paper addresses the deficiency of the traditional AODV routing protocol in handling multi-rate PHY communications. Then, we propose a new cross-layer scheme to enhance the AODV protocol namely Multi-Rate AODV (MR-AODV) to establish efficient routes in the multi-rate wireless environments. The MR-AODV introduces a new routing metric namely Path Gain that is used to select the optimal route between the source and destination nodes. The path gain considers both hop count and data rates at each hop for a given path. It also provides the optimal data rates for forward and reverse links at each hop and therefore improves the end-to-end performance. The cross layer design of MR-AODV enables acquiring information from the MAC layer and rate controlling from the network layer. The performance of the MR-AODV has been evaluated by simulation and results show significant improvement of the performance in multi-rate ad hoc network environments.