A new spectrum path diversity routing protocol based on AODV for cognitive radio Ad Hoc networks

The performance of a cognitive radio network (CRN) is strongly affected by the radio activities of the primary users (PUs). Since these activities arbitrarily vary in time, frequency, and space domains, some diversity techniques have been introduced to reach a desired performance. In this paper, we propose a new AODV-based routing protocol for cognitive radio Ad Hoc networks (CRAHN) that exploits path and spectrum diversity jointly to deal with the effects of activities of PUs. Moreover, we integrate Expected transmission count (ETX) routing metric and channel selection strategy to improve the performance further. Our method uses local spectrum knowledge and local dynamic network topology to efficiently utilize the available channels. We simulate our proposed protocol under different PUs´ activities in NS2 and compare its performance with D2CARP protocol. Our simulation results indicate that our protocol improves throughput and packet delivery ratio significantly.