Demonstrating the feasibility of an Autonomic Communications - Targeted Cross-layer Architecture

Layered architectures are not sufficiently flexible to cope with the dynamics of wireless-dominated next generation communications. Cross-layer architectures may provide a better solution: allowing interactions between two or more non-adjacent layers in the protocol stack. Architectures based on purely local information will not be able to support autonomic communications like self-behaving systems. A new cross-layer architecture which provides a hybrid local and global view, using gossiping to maintain consistency has been proposed in [1]. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of that architecture through two different prototype implementations. Context-awareness is a key issue in autonomic communications and both the implementations directly or indirectly uses it. The first implementation uses contextual information to control Transmission Power of a mobile node and the second one uses it to manage traffic automatically. Results show that context-awareness is possible through our architecture and proves the potential of the proposed architecture.