In Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), ad hoc routing mechanisms assume location awareness of nodes by maintaining neighbourhood routing information frequently. Successive updates and distribution of routing tables result in transmission energy consumption not being optimized. To tackle this issue, cross-layer design is one of the effective techniques. However, before developing a cross-layer protocol, we focus on the performance evaluation of several routing protocols that will be used in the cross-layer design such as Ad Hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), and Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP). Their performances have been evaluated in terms of packet delivery ratio, average energy consumption per data packet, end-to-end delay and residual energy using NS2 simulator. Preliminary results have shown that ZRP protocol offers better overall performance and it is preferred in the cross-layer design. In this paper, we also propose an idea of T-IARP protocol which is a cross-layer design protocol based on Medium Access Control (MAC) and routing protocol. As for this proposed scheme, instead of exchanging the routing information among intermediate nodes, the control frames in MAC layer fully utilize the routing information from the network layer and reserve the selected nodes involved in the actual data transmission. The routing path is maintained by exchanging only the control frames. Exchanges of control frames incurs lesser overhead. Furthermore, the reserved nodes transmit data with adaptive wake-up/sleep duty cycle. However, the performance evaluation of this proposed protocol is planned as part of the future work in this research. © 2021 IEEE.