Parametric survey on cross-layer designs for wireless sensor networks

The network model presented through OSI and TCP/IP comes in different encapsulated modules, which provide the abstract view of layers to its adjacent module. The encapsulations of layers make a profound effect on network efficiency, quality of service (QoS), communication overhead, latency, etc. In addition, it is hard to implement it in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) scenarios. To overcome these architectural effects, cross-layer designs (CLDs) opted which shows promising improvement. It enables information sharing among the non-adjacent layers and compensates the performance and reliability. It is able to provide application-specific on-demand services in WSNs due to its simplicity and flexibility. Moreover, it helps in prolonging network lifetime, improvement in QoS and security of WSNs. In this article, classification made on the parametric improvement achieved by adopting CLDs. The performance metrics co-related to others such as strict latency affect QoS, transmission energy optimization affect the network lifetime, routing affect latency and much more. Therefore, the classification made with the dominated metrics. In this context, CLDs potential had led to include an application-oriented proposal that classified separately due to its specific dominance. Furthermore, the challenges in CLDs with potential resolution has given. We summarize our article with the observation made during the study and the suggestion for improvement on existing methods followed by the discussion on some open problems.