Cooperative routing protocol in cognitive radio ad-hoc networks

Cognitive radio (CR) technology enables the opportunistic use of the vacant licensed frequency bands, thereby improving the spectrum utilization. Therefore, considering end-to-end throughput in CR ad-hoc networks is an important research issue because the availability of local spectrum resources may change frequently with the time and locations. In this paper, we propose a cooperative routing protocol in CR ad-hoc networks. An on-demand routing protocol is used to find an end-to-end minimum cost path between a pair of source and destination. The simulation results show that our proposed cooperative routing protocol not only obtains higher end-to-end throughput, but also reduces the end-to-end delay and the amount of control messages compared to previous work.