SEARCH: A routing protocol for mobile cognitive radio ad-Hoc networks

Recent research in the emerging field of cognitive radio (CR) has mainly focused on spectrum sensing and sharing, that allow an opportunistic use of the vacant portions of the licensed frequency bands by the CR users. Efficiently leveraging this node channel information in order to provide timely end-to-end delivery over the network is a key concern for CR based routing protocols. In addition, the primary users (PUs) of the licensed band affect the channels to varying extents, depending on the proportion of the transmission power that gets leaked into the adjacent channels. This also effects the geographical region, in which, the channel is rendered unusable for the CR users. In this paper, a geographic forwarding based SpEctrum aware routing protocol for Cognitive ad-Hoc networks (SEARCH), is proposed that jointly undertakes path and channel selection to avoid regions of PU activity during route formation. Specifically, the optimal paths found by geographic forwarding on each channel are combined at the destination with an aim to minimize the hop count. By binding the route to regions found free of PU activity, rather than particular CR users, the effect of the PU activity is mitigated. Our proposed approach is thoroughly evaluated through simulation study.