A Multi-Hop Multicasting Routing Protocol for Cognitive Radio Networks
Yaser Jararweh, Mohammad A. Alsmirat, Muneer Al-Zaboon, Haythem A. Bany Salameh and Osamah S. Badarneh
Multicasting in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) is receiving a great interest from researchers in both academia and industry. In this work, we investigate the problem of multi-hop multicasting routing in CRNs. To solve this problem, we propose a new multi-hop multicasting routing protocol for CRNs. The proposed protocol finds the best multi-hop path between a sender and a group of receivers and guarantees the use of the best channels along the path. We propose three variations of the proposed protocol depending on how the channel assignment is performed. In the first variation, the operating channel is determined based on channel quality only (measured in terms of the transmission time). The second variation chooses the best channel based on the average channel availability time only. The last variation determines the best channel based on the channel probability of success, which is a metric that combines both channel quality and average channel availability time. We conduct ns-2 simulation experiments to evaluate the performance of our proposed protocols under various network conditions.
Keywords: Software defined radio, cognitive radio networks, cross-layer, dynamic spectrum access, multicasting, multi-hop routing, video streaming