Throughput-oriented connection scheme for cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) have become a popular research topic in recent years. Most existing CRN routing schemes focus on building a route that optimizes a single aspect of a network´s performance, such as minimizing interference for primary users, or reducing the propagation delay or hop count. They do not consider the overall transmission performance for secondary users. In this work, our objective is to maximize a system´s long-term estimated throughput. To this end, we propose two routing schemes, called TBR and A-TBR, for different types of cognitive radio interfaces. The schemes establish routes by considering multiple system factors, such as the interference rate and the transmission bitrate, simultaneously. The results of simulations show that the schemes yield higher throughput than existing approaches and the transmission delay is acceptable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that proposes a solution to the long-term performance of CRNs.