Location-aware probabilistic route discovery for cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radios emerged as a solution for utilizing the spectrum which is considered a limited resource. Multi-hop routing in cognitive radio networks (CRNs) has been gaining increasing attention as it enables future large-scale CRNs. However, many existing protocols flood the network with control packets in route discovery phase, which leads to wasting bandwidth. In this paper, we introduce a location-aware probabilistic route discovery technique for CRNs that leverages gossiping with dynamic probabilities to reduce the flooding overhead without affecting the quality of the discovered routes. The proposed technique can be used on top of any routing protocol regardless of whether it relies on a common control channel or not. Evaluation of our technique through ns2 simulations for improving different classes of routing protocols shows a significant reduction in the number of control packets by up to 75% and an increase in throughput by up to 400%.