Local Coordination Based Routing and Spectrum Assignment in Multi-hop Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

Although Cognitive Radio technology brings efficient spectrum usage and effective interference avoidance, it also brings new challenges to routing in multi-hop Cognitive Radio Networks. Firstly, spectrum assignment is required for each hop in routing; secondly, new delay is introduced during multi-frequency scheduling and frequency switching in each node; thirdly, the intersecting nodes serving multi-frequency traffic is easy to be bottleneck in neighborhood region. In this paper, we analysis and model the pernode delay and the path delay in multi-hop Cognitive Radio Network. Then we propose a framework of local coordination based routing and spectrum assignment to solve above problems, which consists of one protocol for routing path and one scheme for neighborhood region. A on-demand Routing and Spectrum Assignment Protocol is proposed to exchange the local spectrum information and interact with multi-frequency scheduling in each node. A local coordination scheme is presented to support flow redirection at an intersecting node and distribute heavy multi-frequency workload to its neighborhood. We prove the correctness and effectiveness of the protocol by thorough simulations, and find that the proposed solution provides good adaptability to varying spectrum distribution. The end-to-end delay when adaptive relay is cooperating with routing protocol outperforms traditional bare-routing solutions.