Reliable Routing in Programmable Radio Wireless Networks

The ongoing research in software-defined radios and the policy/regulation reform by the FCC are paving a road for dynamic spectrum access which allows unlicensed users to access spectrum that has been allocated to a primary user in a dynamic and non-interfering manner, and creates a new type of wireless network termed programmable radio wireless network (ProWin). Due to the non-interfering requirement, a spectrum band used by communication in ProWin may be unexpectedly preempted by licensed users at any time. Such spectrum band preemptions in ProWin are likely to occur frequently, which challenges reliable communications in ProWin. In this paper, we propose an architecture to create reliable ProWin and, in particular, focus on reliable routing in this architecture. We examine how to compute the link reliability and select reliable routing paths. The numerical results show that the reliable routing can achieve significantly better performance than the conventional shortest path routing that is widely used in IP networks.