  One of the big challenges in ad hoc network design is packet routing. Studies
have shown that on-demand routing protocols perform better than table-driven
routing protocols. In order to avoid route discovery for each packet, on-demand
routing protocols cache routes previously learnt. A node in ad hoc network
learns routing information by overhearing or forwarding packets to other nodes
and keep learned routes in its route cache. However, node movement results
broken links and therefore increases risk of cache pollution. Ensuring cache
freshness in on-demand routing protocols, therefore, presents a serious
challenge. A lot of research has been done in route cache organization,
however, little effort has been done for route cache timeout policy to prevent
stale routes from being used. In this paper we propose a new cross-layer
framework to improve route cache performance in on-demand routing protocols.
The proposed framework presents novel use of Received Signal Strength Indicator
(RSSI) information to choose cache timeout of individual links in route cache.
