ABSTRACT
Modern wireless communication systems provide a variety of adaptation capabilities at different layers of the classical protocol stack. To maximize the overall performance of these systems, there is the need for a scheme that allows the efficient cooperation between protocols that operate in different layers. A number of proposals can be found in the recent literature that try to provide this cooperation and are usually referred to as cross-layer cooperative designs. This chapter provides a categorization of these proposals based on their target objective and discusses their main characteristics. To emphasize on the performance improvement that such a solution can provide to a legacy system, a cross-layer cooperation mechanism for WiMAX networks is described in detail.
