Spectrum Aware Opportunistic Routing in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio (CR) emerges as a key technology to enhance spectrum efficiency and thus creates opportunistic transmissions over links. Supporting the routing function on top of numerous opportunistic links is a must to route packets in a general cognitive radio network (CRN) consisting of multi-radio systems. However, there lacks complete understanding of these highly dynamic available links and a reliable end-to-end transportation mechanism over CRN. Aspiring to meet this need, we propose novel spectrum aware opportunistic routing (SAOR) algorithm suited for the CRN under wireless fading channels. With innovative establishment of the spectrum map from local sensing information and the derivation of the routing metric for opportunistic links known as opportunistic link transmission (OLT), the opportunistic path metrics, and the CR node metrics, the promising SAOR employs a cooperative scheme to enable multi-path transmissions and maintains the statistical QoS guaranteed throughput for practical applications. Numerical results confirm that SAOR enjoys less delay with guaranteed throughput, not only in CRN, but also in general wireless network.