Joint Channel and Interference Aware Cooperative Routing for Cognitive Radio Network

Cognitive Radio based network technology provides a promising solution for various types of real-time wireless communication by offering better spectrum utilization and resource allocation. Generally, the dynamic network topology, interference, channel switching and under-utilization of resource can degrade the network performance. Therefore, development of promising solution to obtain the desired performance is a challenging research topic in CRNs. Several researches have been carried out which have focused on development of routing protocol for CRNs to improve the performance. These routing protocols are classified as local and global routing which are mainly focused on overhead reduction and optimal route selection respectively. However, the conventional approaches suffer from various issues such as interflow-interference, channel switching delay and node overhearing problems which can progress towards the poor network performance. In this paper, our objective is to focus on the inter-flow interference, channel switching delay, and develop a cooperative communication based approaches where inter-flow interference and overhearing issues are mitigated using cooperative communication. Furthermore, Switching Delay and Interference (SDI) routing metric is developed to reduce the switching delay and also finally, a cooperative scheme of packet transmission is developed where direct or cooperative communication is selected for successful packet transmission. The proposed approach jointly considers channel and interference issue, hence it is known as Joint Cooperative Channel and Interference Aware Routing (JCIAR). The performance of proposed approach is compared with the existing techniques such as Primary User Aware k-hop route discovery scheme (PAK), AODV, Cognitive- AODV, and Location-Aided Routing for CRN (LAUNCH) in terms of delay, packet delivery rate and throughput. The obtained result shows a significant improvement in network performance.