Quantifying the Multiple Cognitive Radio Interfaces Advantage

Abstract

In recent times, wireless communications has established itself as a popular access technology due to the user preference for the exibility of untethered communication. The single biggest problem that still impedes broader up- take of wireless technology is scarceness of wireless capacity. The lack of wireless capacity scaling is primarily due to two factors: rstly, wireless in- terference that limits a wireless channel to only possible transmission at any given time; and secondly, the current radio spectrum management scheme based on licensing frequency spectrum which is known to be very ine cient. Two well-known techniques that address parts of our considered problem space in wireless networks include: 1) cognitive radio networks (CRNs) or dynamic-spectrum-access (DSA) networks that utilize programmable soft- ware de ned radios to address the wireless standards interoperability prob- lem, and 2) multi-radio multi-channel (MRMC) technology, which addresses the wireless scalability problem, in which each node is equipped with mul- tiple radio interfaces (that can tune to any one of the available orthogonal channel) to allow multiple overlapping transmissions. In this thesis, we aim to investigate the bene ts of a hybrid of these ap- proaches: an approach that call C-MRMC technology. In C-MRMC wireless ii networks, each node is equipped with multiple cognitive radio interfaces. We investigate in our work the potential improvement in performance (which we gauge in metrics such as throughput, packet delivery ratio, etc.) gained by such an approach through extensive simulations. Our results demonstrate that having such an approach is viable and can lead to signi cant perfor- mance gains.