Improving Performance of Cluster Based Routing Protocol using   Cross-Layer Design
  The main goal of routing protocol is to efficiency delivers data from source to destination. All routing protocols are the same in this goal, but the way they adopt to achieve it is different, so routing strategy has an egregious role on the performance of an ad hoc network. Most of routing protocols proposed for ad hoc networks have a flat structure. These protocols expand the control overhead packets to discover or maintain a route. On the other hand a number of hierarchical-based routing protocols have been developed, mostly are based on layered design. These protocols improve network performances especially when the network size grows up since details about remote portion of network can be handled in an aggregate manner. Although, there is another approach to design a protocol called cross-layer design. Using this approach information can exchange between different layer of protocol stack, result in optimizing network performances.   In this paper, we intend to exert cross-layer design to optimize Cluster Based Routing Protocol (Cross-CBRP). Using NS-2 network simulator we evaluate rate of cluster head changes, throughput and packet delivery ratio. Comparisons denote that Cross-CBRP has better performances with respect to the original CBRP. 
Kazem Jahanbakhsh, Marzieh Hajhosseini