Xing-zone bridge construction for multi-hop cognitive radio networks with channel bonding

Cognitive radio is an efficient technique to relieve the tense of wireless spectrum scarcity by allowing unlicensed secondary users (SUs) to access the licensed band opportunistically without causing interference to primary users (PUs). Although Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently ruled that the data of PU activity schedule is accessible to SUs 24 hours ahead, which relieves SUs from heavy sensing or interruption by sudden PU activity, however, multi-hop wireless cognitive radio networks (MWCRN) suffers a unique problem caused by the fact that the spectrum resources are not unified in different areas affected by different PUs. In other words, an SU origin-destination (OD) pair transmission would meet the bottleneck in bandwidth when crossing areas with different available spectrum resources. To solve this problem, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the number of connection bridges to cross different areas. Moreover, we introduce channel bonding technique into the MWCRN for network performance improvement. We also propose a distributed algorithm for practical application. Simulation results verifies the better performance of our proposed scheme.