Performance enhancement of cognitive radio Wireless Mesh Networks by link scheduling and beamforming

Cognitive Radio is an emerging technology that allows an efficient spectrum utilization by enabling the temporary use of the unused time-frequency resources in a licensed spectrum without interfering with the transmission of other users. As the cognitive radio is envisaged to solve spectrum scarcity, it can be applied to WMNs resulting in huge gains in terms of network capacity and enhanced quality services for the end user. In this paper, we have presented an efficient beamforming technique, which adds a third search dimension to sensing technology, i.e. the angle, thereby increasing the probability of the unused timefrequency-angle resources. Secondly, we have also proposed an efficient cross layer link scheduling approach to minimize interference, which is a critical factor affecting WMN performance. Simulation results show effectiveness of our proposed methods as the results are closer to the near optimum solution.