ABSTRACT

Wireless communication has been fast emerging as an important research paradigm, and its utility in several application areas is also gaining momentum. It is being implemented in various interesting application areas, such as battlefield surveillance, traffic monitoring, health care, environment monitoring, etc. [1]. Day-to-day experiments are being conducted for testing the feasibility of wireless networks in several new upcoming areas. Wireless networks make use of the unguarded wireless medium for communication that is largely responsible for making security one of the prime factors of importance in such networks. One of the prime networking requirements is the layered protocol architecture. Although layered architectures in wired networks have performed quite well, their use in wireless networks is still a debatable issue. This is because these networks are generally resource-constrained, and therefore, the concept of cross-layer architectures being used here is becoming quite popular. So cross-layer methodology came into the picture involving more than one layer and exploiting the dependence between protocol layers (Figure 15.1) instead of independent working of layers in layered networks.