Achieving a good trade-off between complexity and enhancement in cross layer architectures

The cross-layer design approach is an important concept in mobile ad-hoc networks which is adopted to solve several open issues. It aims to overcome MANET performance problems by allowing protocols belonging to different layers to cooperate and share network status informations while still maintaining separated layers. While cross-layer model could enhance the performance of the applications and achieve better QoS support, there is a lot of proposed models that have to be compared and optimized. In this paper, we investigate the different requirements to achieve a good cooperation. Then, we compare two cross -layer models dealing with delay sensitive application constraints and stability issues in MANET. The simulation results demonstrate that the performance of the proposals is strongly depending on the selective shared parameters.