A location-aided routing protocol for cognitive radio networks

Multi-hop cognitive radio networks (CRNs) are gaining interest recently in many practical applications. With location information becoming more available, designing location-aware routing protocols that fit the nature of CRNs becomes a necessity. We present LAUNCH as a location-aided routing protocol for CRNs that has a set of desirable properties: efficient use of the common control channel, has a minimal route setup delay, prefers stable routes, handles primary users heterogeneity, and handles secondary users mobility. LAUNCH is based on four main concepts: (1) a novel location-aware CRN routing metric that takes into account the PUs activity; (2) distributed calculations at the neighbors; (3) a channel locking mechanism to achieve the route stability and minimize channel switching time; (4) an efficient route maintenance strategy. Evaluation of LAUNCH on the NS2 simulator shows that its performance significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art CRNs routing protocols in terms of end-to-end delay and packet loss rate. In addition, LAUNCH incurs a low control overhead with a fast route establishment delay.