ROAM: Supporting safety critical applications in MANETs with cross-layer middleware

Provision of instantaneous, mobile and dependable media communications in military and disaster scenarios must overcome certain wireless network issues: lack of reliable existing infrastructure, immutability of safety-certified protocols and layer-2 dynamics with contributing factors including hidden transmitters and fading channels. This extended abstract investigates a cross-layer methodology to provide timely MANET communications through optimal channel selection and dynamic contention reduction, without protocol modification. This is done using ROAM: a new Real-time Optimised Ad hoc Middleware based architecture that has been implemented and validated in the ns2-MIRACLE simulator.