Application-aware routing for multi-hop cognitive radio networks with channel bonding

Due to the unequal spectrum resources in different areas, multi-hop wireless cognitive radio network (MWCRN) faces the challenge of a relatively poor performance. In this paper, we propose an application-aware routing scheme with channel bonding technique to help improve the efficiency and performance of a MWCRN network. More specifically, we formulate an optimization problem aiming to meet the application request, as well as operating at low transmission cost. To solve this problem, we first study the greatest lower bound of transmission cost named as Utopian cost, as well as an upper bound of transmission cost. Moreover, we propose two distributed algorithms for practical applications. Simulation results show that the proposed application-aware scheme achieves low transmission cost in MWCRN while satisfying demands of application requests.