Simulation modeling and analysis of the hop count distribution in cognitive radio ad-hoc networks with beamforming

Abstract

Due to the spatial–temporal spectrum mobility in cognitive radio ad-hoc networks (CRAHNs), multi-hop communication paths among secondary users have to detour or even be disconnected to avoid interfering with primary users. Consequently, the hop count in CRAHNs shows distinguishing characteristics compared with those in conventional ad-hoc networks (AHNs). Although the influences of beamforming on the connectivity of CRAHNs have been studied in the literature, no research works on investigating the hop count in cognitive environment under the joined effect of beamforming have been conducted. In this paper, we model CRAHNs where SUs are equipped with directional antennas as geometric random graphs and then propose a framework for simulation analysis of the hop count distribution. Our proposed framework comprises of two components. The first one is an algorithm which finds all possible paths between two random secondary users selected as source node and destination node then returns the hop count of the shortest path between them by using the random values of node location and active state, antenna gain, and channel fading as input data. The second one is a methodology which returns the hop count distribution and connection probability of these two nodes from vast number of examined random network topology trials. We show that the hop count and the connectivity between two secondary users greatly depend on the number of antenna elements of directional antenna. Moreover, only a specific combination of direction antenna and beamforming scheme gives better performance than omnidirectional antenna. The observed results in this paper provide useful guidelines on designing and evaluating hop count based applications in CRAHNs with beamforming.