An Application-Oriented Routing Protocol for Multi-hop Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract—A challenge for routing in cognitive radio networks is the intermittent connection due to the occupying and releasing licensed channels of primary users. To solve this problem, the routing protocol will choose the most stable channel (the channel with the longest average length of idle period) to build up the stable path. This approach, however, can lead to the increase of channel competition between cognitive users since the most stable channels are preferred to be utilized by all cognitive users. In this paper, an application-oriented routing protocol is proposed. The main motivation is to reduce the channel competition between cognitive users by finding the appropriate path according to the application of cognitive users. Simulation results show that our proposed routing protocol reduces the loss ratio and increases the throughput significantly. Index Terms—cognitive radio; application-oriented; routing; stability I