A novel on-demand routing protocol for cluster-based Cognitive Radio ad-hoc Network

With the swift growth in wireless communication technologies, demand for new radio spectrum is mounting. Since, radio spectrum is finite, forthcoming technologies may experience scarcity of the spectrum. Moreover, due to the existing spectrum management scheme, radio spectrum is also underutilized. Hence, Cognitive Radio Network (CRN), which uses open spectrum allocation technique, can ensure effective handling of the spectrum. However, proper and effective network structure with communication protocols is the prerequisite to implement CRN efficiently. Thus, a novel on-demand routing protocol for cluster-based cognitive radio ad-hoc network is presented in the paper. Initially, the network is separated in several clusters, where the spatial variance of spectrum availability is cogitated for clustering. Next, a routing protocol for the cluster-based network is developed. The routing protocol is defined as a weighted graph problem, where link weight is calculated over three types of delay namely, switching delay, back-off delay and queuing delay. Simulation is conducted to evaluate and to compare the performance of the proposed protocol. From the comparative study, it is observed that the proposed protocol out performs the other existing protocols.