Cross-Layer Design in Multihop Wireless Networks

In this paper, the authors take a holistic approach to the protocol architecture design in multi-hop wireless networks. Their goal is to integrate various protocol layers into a rigorous framework, by regarding them as distributed computations over the network to solve some optimization problem. Different layers carry out distributed computation on different subsets of the decision variables using local information to achieve individual optimality. Taken together, these local algorithms (with respect to different layers) achieve a global optimality. Their current theory integrates three functions-congestion control, routing and scheduling-in transport, network and link layers into a coherent framework.