Totally-Ordered, Reliable Multicast over Cognitive Radio Networks

This paper summarizes the evaluation of a totally-ordered, reliable multicast protocol over a cognitive radio (CR) network. Multicast enables a group of nodes to subscribe to broadcast messages. Reliability ensures that all nodes receive messages correctly, totally-ordered ensures that all nodes receive messages in sequential order. In the proposed architecture, CR nodes employ multicast to exchange radio environment maps and to perform dynamic spectrum access. Emulation and wireless test beds were constructed and baseline unicast quality of service (QoS) measured. The Spread open-source multicast software toolkit was installed on all nodes and the resulting multicast QoS measured. Channel effects were applied to the emulation test bed, so that its QoS modeled that of the wireless test bed. This paper demonstrates that it is feasible to characterize multicast QoS over a CR wireless network, through the use of an equivalent emulated network.