Enhancing content dissemination for ad hoc cognitive radio

Nowadays, the channel selection is a challenging task in cognitive radio because of the high radio activity and the preemptive priority of the licensed user, called primary user (PU). In this paper, we propose a DIStributed channel Selection mechanism for efficient content dissemination in COgnitive RaDio ad-hoc networks (DISCORD). DISCORD selects the most appropriate channel for content dissemination based on the PU channel occupancy and the importance of cognitive radio neighbors in the network. Indeed, a sender peer in DISCORD forecasts the channel primary user activity by the mean of the actual and statistical estimation of the channels occupancy and selects the most stable one. Moreover, it makes use of a new Social Networks Analysis (SNA) inspired metric to select the appropriate neighbors for high content dissemination in the network. The simulation results using NS2 shows that Discord presents highest performance in terms of interferences, PU priority respect and content delivery ratio in multi-hop CRNs comparing to four related protocols.