Abstract EN:

This dissertation focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of 802. 11-based cross-layer mechanisms for the enhancement of the support of the QoS feature. Before the cross-layer study, we have also explored the idea of enhancing separately a communications layer; namely the existing 802. 11e MAC protocol which is designed for the QoS support. Although the improvements achieved, this study shows the limitations of the layered architecture that demonstrated its good performance in wired networks. Due to the large number of cross-layer cooperation possibilities, we emphasize, in this work, on the cooperation between the MAC and the network layers. We believe that the cooperation between these two layers provides better performance improvement than the cooperation between other layers. In particular, we focus on the problem of routing data packets in a way that takes into account channel contention level, network characteristics, and higher-layer protocol requirements. We address the optimal routing with regard to links stability, average end-to-end delay, and energy conservation with and without assistance/initiation from the network. We design several cross-layer mechanisms that aim to overcome the issue of routing in MANETs while enhancing important QoS metrics (path stability, energy consumption, end-to-end delay, etc. ). To this end, we extract the adequate parameters from both MAC and network layers and adapt them to provide QoS enhancement based on new inter-layer cooperation algorithms. Furthermore, we identify the challenges that face the cross-layer architectures comparing to the traditional layered architecture for enhancing communication protocols.