Research On Routing Technology For Multi-hop Cognitive Radio Networks

Along with the advancement of cognitive radio, cognitive radio based wireless network architecture is introduced into traditional multi-hop wireless networks, which convert these networks into multi-hop cognitive radio networks. To meet the requirements of multi-hop wireless communications, novel routing protocols are needed for these networks.This paper mainly researches on the spectrum aware routing technology of multi-hop cognitive radio networks. A channel assignment algorithm for MSCRN (Multi-hop Single Transceiver Cognitive Radio Networks) is derived from delay-analysis. The overhead and gain by switching are balanced in this algorithm. For deafness problem caused by switching can result in significant performance degradation, constraints to avoid the appearance of deafness in channel assignment process are given. Based on this algorithm, a spectrum aware on-demand routing protocol MSCRP (Multi-hop Single-transceiver CRN Routing Protocol) is proposed, which doesn't need a common control channel. MSCRP adopts the framework of on-demand routing which includes route request, route response and route maintenance. The channel assignment of MSCRP is executed in the route response process, which realizes the spectrum aware function of MSCRP. A simulation platform of MSCRN is built in OPNET to test the performance of MSCRP. Results of simulation show that, MSCRP can well fit MSCRN and provide a feasible solution to improve the performance of traditional multi-hop wireless networks by cognitive radio technology.