Quantifying the Multiple Cognitive Radio Interfaces Advantage

In recent times, wireless communications has established itself as a popular access technology due to the user preference for the flexibility of untethered communication. The single biggest problem that still impedes broader uptake of wireless technology is scarceness of wireless capacity. The lack of wireless capacity scaling is primarily due to two factors: firstly, wireless interference that limits a wireless channel to only possible transmission at any given time, and secondly, the current radio spectrum management scheme based on licensing frequency spectrum which is known to be very inefficient. Two well-known techniques that address parts of our considered problem space in wireless networks include: 1) cognitive radio networks (CR) or dynamic-spectrum-access (DSA) networks that utilize programmable software defined radios to address the wireless standards interoperability problem, and 2) multi-radiomulti-channel (MRMC) technology, which addresses the wireless scalability problem, in which each node is equipped with multiple radio interfaces (that can tune to any one of the available orthogonal channel) to allow multiple overlapping transmissions. In this work, we aim to investigate the benefits of a hybrid of these approaches: an approach that call C-MRMC technology. In C-MRMC wireless networks, each node is equipped with multiple cognitive radio interfaces. We investigate in our work the potential improvement in performance (which we gauge in metrics such as throughput, packet delivery ratio) gained by such an approach through extensive simulations. Our results demonstrate that having such an approach is viable and can lead to significant performance gains.