DAU- Distance-Utilization Routing Protocol for Cognitive Radio Wireless Mesh Networks

Spectrum scarcity creates a Brobdingnagian problems in wireless networks. Hence, efficient spectrum aware and management schemes are needed to solve this problem in wireless networks. Cognitive Radio Network(CRN) caters to this need. These radios are designed such that their transceiver makes use of best available wireless channels in its vicinity and enables more communications to run concurrently by changing its transmission parameters and thereby increasing the efficiency. In this paper, a Distance And Utilization based Routing Protocol(DAU) is proposed to enable the secondary users to utilize the channels in a dynamic way that are currently vacated by primary users. DAU protocol is unique in the way that it makes use of an utilization factor of channels for choosing the next hop for transmission of data. The proposed protocol is simulated with NS2 and its performance is analyzed using various network parameters. The simulation results indicate that the DAU protocol performs well compared to the existing protocols.