QoS-aware routing protocol for Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks

The cognitive radio network has been proposed to overcome the frailty of existing spectrum allocation strategies, by dynamically accessing the licensed spectrum instead of conventional static spectrum access. Thereby, the increasing traffic on the unlicensed wireless spectrum is diverted to unused licensed spectrum bands for providing spectrum space to new wireless users. Wireless services have a diverse quality of service requirements. Accordingly, the proposed routing protocol selects a distinct channel at every hop and a distinct route based on the service requirements. Delay and SU-to-PU interference are recognized as the quality of service requirements of class-I and class-II types of traffic. Subsequently, the mathematical equations are derived to estimate the spectrum band-specific link delay and SU-to-PU interference ratio. The derived equations are then used for channel and route selection. The proposed work is simulated using ns-2 and is then compared with the existing work. Simulation results show the performance improvement of the proposed work in terms of throughput, delay, and interference to PU.