Design and simulated evaluation of a routing protocol for Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

In this project, we address the problem of minimizing the worst-case broadcast latency in cognitive radio networks. Such networks have the capability to efficiently utilize the spectrum holes or white spaces in the available radio spectrum. Efficient routing in cognitive radio networks is especially challenging since the channel will not always be available and will not have the same transmission range or data rates etc, due to interference by licensed or unlicensed users of the radio spectrum. We propose a framework which calculates a localized forwarding structure in the form of an interference and dynamic channel aware mesh, irrespective of a broadcasting source node. Our proposed algorithm enables the forwarding mesh to maintain stable routes throughout the network, without the need to reconstruct the entire forwarding structure, if the available channel set changes.