Spectrum Aware Multi-Channel Opportunistic Routing in Cognitive Radio Sensor Networks

In order to improve the throughput of Cognitive radio sensor networks (CRSNs) and cope with unreliable wireless channels, opportunistic routing (OR) protocols have been proposed. Traditional OR protocols are worked on single channel environments and most OR protocols prioritize the candidates on the cost defined as ETX (expected number of transmissions). In this paper, we propose a multi-channel opportunistic routing protocol (MCORP) in CRSN. When assigning the priority of candidates, we introduce a new metric that balances the remaining power of the candidate, the delivery ratio and the ETX. The delivery ratio and ETX of each link can be calculated average for all channels contained in CRSN. Also, we propose a candidate construction algorithm since there exists a trade-off between the benefit (transmission reliability) and cost (energy consumption) when selecting the optimize candidate set. The main contribution of this paper is reflected in the packet forwarding process, which can utilize multi-channels also joint with the feature of opportunistic. Simulation results show that MCORP performs better in throughput than the multi-channel routing (MCR) protocol.