User social activity-based routing for cognitive radio networks

Abstract

The social activities of Primary Users (PUs) and Secondary Users (SUs) affect actual accessible whitespace in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs). However, the impacts of primary activities on available whitespace have been extensively investigated due to the dominating priority of PUs, while the impacts of secondary activities on actual accessible whitespace have been ignored. Therefore, we propose to incorporate the primary and secondary activities in the analysis and decision of the accessible whitespace, namely, both the dominance of PUs over SUs and the competitions among SUs are simultaneously taken into account. Specifically, we first approximate primary activity probability based on the real datasets of mobile phone usage records, then the spectrum opportunity between a pair of communication SUs is deduced based on primary activities. Next, we infer the access probability limit of SUs successfully accessing the whitespace according to the primary activity probability, and depict the secondary activity probability from the views of social activity patterns and social networks respectively. Furthermore, the actual accessible probability of whitespace is given by introducing the competitions among SUs. Finally, a greedy routing algorithm, considering the accessible whitespace and the distance to the destination, is proposed to verify our idea. The experiment results based on the real datasets demonstrate the correctness of our analysis and the advantages of the proposed algorithm.