Spectrum and energy aware multipath routing for cognitive radio ad hoc networks

Spectrum and energy aware routing is very important in energy-constraint cognitive radio (CR) networks. On the other hand, it is crucial that CR users efficiently exchange data with each other before the appearance of licensed primary user (PU). To design a robust routing scheme for mobile CR ad hoc networks (CRANs), the constraints on residual energy of each CR user, reliability, and the protection of PUs must additionally be taken into consideration. Moreover, multipath routing has great potential for improving the end-to-end performance of ad hoc networks. Considering all these facts, in this paper, we propose a spectrum and energy aware multipath routing (SEMR) scheme for mobile CRANs to ensure the robustness and to improve the throughput. The proposed routing scheme involves energy efficient multipath route selection and spectrum allocation jointly. We present experimental results, which show that the proposed multipath mechanism outperforms a number of existing mechanisms in the environment of mobile CRANs.