Spectrum and Energy Aware Routing Protocol for Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks

Throughput maximization is one of the core challenges in cognitive radio ad hoc networks (CRANs), where local spectrum resources are changing over time and locations. This paper proposes a spectrum and energy aware routing (SER) protocol for CRANs, which involves spectrum aware, and energy-efficient route selection, and channel-timeslot assignment. A good routing protocol should be aware of the interference as well as the end-to-end delay. The proposed joint spectrum and energy aware routing with channel-timeslot assignment can balance the energy consumption, eliminates contention between users, and decompose contending traffics over different channels and timeslots. As a result, the proposed scheme leads to significant increases in network throughput and decreases the end-to-end delay. The simulation results show the effectiveness of our proposed approach with good generalization ability.