An on-demand routing protocol for multi-hop multi-radio multi-channel cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio networks are composed of spectrum-agile devices capable of changing their configurations and transmission parameters on the fly based on their spectral environment. This capability opens up the possibility of designing flexible and dynamic spectrum access strategies with the purpose of opportunistically reusing portions of the spectrum temporarily vacated by licensed primary users. However, this flexibility in the spectrum access brings a new complexity in the design of communication protocols at different layers. In this paper, we consider the problem of routing in multi-hop cognitive radio networks. We propose a multi-radio multi-channel on-demand solution that is able to effectively manage the transmission activities of cognitive and primary users. The routing metric should be carefully developed in order to provide a tradeoff between the channel diversity of the routing path and the end-to-end delay. Through simulations, we highlight the performance of our proposed solution and compare it to multi-radio multichannel on-demand distance vector protocol.