A Survey on Issues and Possible Solutions of Cross-Layer Design in Internet of Things

Last decade has seen the evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) and it has been affiliated with various networking technologies. The study shows that blending various networks like WSN, WBAN, and LoRaWAN with digital devices will revolutionize the current decade. Billions of wireless devices will cooperate and communicate with each other to generate huge data every day. The heterogeneity of devices and communication network technologies are inherent in IoT. Various digital devices are connected and interact with various devices, which have different specifications and run on different platforms. Therefore, the heterogeneity of network architecture, communication technologies, and application requirement intricacy enforce many challenges. Traditional communication technologies which rely heavily on layered approach need an amendment to suit the need of the IoT as various layers (e.g. Transport layer’s TCP) fails to address the issues of heterogeneity. This work reviews various cross-layer mechanisms extensively, which have been suggested in past to overcome the issue and challenges which arose due to the heterogeneous nature of IoT. We also identify the main issues such as energy consumption, mobility, interoperability, security, privacy, and scalability, etc. faced when using cross-layer design (CLD) in IoT and suggest available cross-layer solutions for them.