Interference-aware multipath routing in a Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Network

Abstract

Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks (CRAHNs) are an emerging class of mobile ad hoc networks that provide each network node with a list of available channels. In a CRAHN with multiple transceivers per node, multipath routing can effectively increase the end-to-end capacity by exploiting channel orthogonality at the receivers and along transit nodes. In this paper, we present a novel multipath route generation technique for use in a CRAHN environment. Using a novel adaptation of Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm, our technique computes multiple routing paths between any two nodes in a multi-hop network while minimizing cost, intra-flow interference, and inter-flow interference between these multiple routing paths. We present a proof of algorithm correctness. We present experimental results, which show that the proposed multipath mechanism outperforms traditional single-path mechanism by over 30% in CRAHN environments.