Spectrum aware virtual coordinates assignment and routing in multihop cognitive radio network

We propose Spectrum Aware Virtual Coordinate (SAViC) for multi hop cognitive radio network (CRN) to facilitate geographic routing. The proposed virtual coordinates (VC) of any two secondary users reflect both geographic distance and opportunistic spectrum availability between them. As a result, geographic routing is able to detour the area affected by licensed users or cut through the area with more available spectrum. According to different spectrum occupation patterns of primary user, two versions of SAViC are designed based on the channel utility and primary user's sojourning time respectively. Simulation shows the proposed virtual coordinate facilitates geographic routing to achieve high success rate of path construction. When duty cycle on the licensed channel is heterogeneous in the network, channel utility based virtual coordinate supports geographic routing to outperform a state-of-the-art geographic routing protocol by 40% on packet delivery ratio. When the channel utility is identical on each secondary node, and the sojourning time of primary users for secondary users are different from each other, SAViC based on primary user's sojourning time achieves significantly shorter delay than other virtual coordinates.