Channel allocation and multicast routing in cognitive radio networks

In this paper, we propose a joint channel allocation and multicast routing scheme for a multihop cognitive radio network. Our scheme can react to the dynamic change of channel availability. It can maximize the multicast throughput by jointly performing channel allocation and multicast routing. We first model the activities of the primary users, channel availability and the interference among the secondary users in a cognitive radio network, and show a basic scenario of multicast for a multihop cognitive radio network. Second, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the multicast throughput of the network. We consider the channel availability constraints and the interference constraints jointly, and make use of the transmission of the hyperlinks. Furthermore, we compare the performance of our scheme with existing schemes for different scenarios of channel availability and the number of channels through simulations. Our work brings insights on how to make route selection and channel allocation for multicast in multihop cognitive radio networks.