Energy-aware routing protocol for cognitive radio ad hoc networks

Routing is one of the most important issues in multihop ad hoc networks. In the routing for mobile cognitive radio (CR) networks, the constraints on residual energy of each user and the requirements for primary user protection should be additionally taken into account. This study proposes a spectrum and energy-aware routing (SER) protocol for CR ad hoc networks, which is based on the dynamic source routing. To establish routes on-demand with reserved bandwidth, the protocol involves route selection and channel-timeslot allocation jointly. The proposed SER protocol can balance energy consumption, reduce routing overhead, eliminate contention between nodes and decompose traffics over different channels/timeslots. Extensive simulation shows that the proposed protocol achieves good performance in system throughput, network lifetime and mean message delay.