ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Cross Layer Network Architecture for Efficient Packet Forwarding in Wireless Networks

With the evolution of 802.11-based wireless networks from hotspots to mesh networks, there has been a tremendous increase in the number of wireless users and density of deployments. Conse-quently, current wireless network face several problems due to interference, uncoordinated medium access, packet processing overheads at each hop and sub-optimal route selection. While radio tech-nologies continue to improve speeds upto hundred megabits per second, the inadequacies of medium access and routing protocols severely impact the overall network capacity and end-user experience. In this thesis, we focus on improving the scalability and packet forwarding efficiency of multihop wireless networks. We introduce a self-organizing hierarchical ad-hoc network design (SOHAN) based on a three-tier hierarchy with dedicated forwarding nodes to address the scalability of existing multihop net-works. We focus on realistic system design considerations and develop a Linux-based system pro-totype including novel protocols for bootstrapping, discovery and topology control to enable hier-archical self-organization. Experimental and simulation-based evaluations indicate a ∼2.5 times ii performance improvement over flat network models