Enhanced cross-layer based middleware for mobile ad hoc networks

The middleware developed for traditional mobile wireless networks cannot be directly applied to mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) due to MANET's salient characteristics such as node mobility and limited resources. Most existing message-oriented middleware for mobile networks rely on infrastructure or assume the existence of reliable and continuous connections among communicating entities. These schemes do not take advantage of cross-layer optimization. Publish/subscribe middleware has been widely used to provide asynchronous communication functionality in distributed application environments. Due to frequent node disconnections, asynchronous publish/subscribe message middleware is a proper communication model for mobile ad hoc networking environments. This paper presents mobility aware and a cross-layer based middleware (MOBCROSS) for MANETs. MOBCROSS is based on the publishing and subscription of topics. The main features of MOBCROSS are mobility awareness, network reconfiguration, message caching, and cross-layer interaction support. The performance of the middleware is evaluated in a simulation environment. MOBCROSS is compared with middleware without cross-layer (MWCL) scheme. MWCL provides caching but does not employ cross-layering. The simulation results indicated that MOBCROSS achieves higher performance as compared to MWCL with respect to packet delivery ratio with slightly lower message overhead. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.