CROR: Coding-aware opportunistic routing in multi-channel cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio (CR) is a promising technology to improve spectrum utilization. However, spectrum availability is uncertain which mainly depends on primary user's (PU's) behaviors. This makes it more difficult for most existing CR routing protocols to achieve high throughput in multi-channel cognitive radio networks (CRNs). Inter-session network coding and opportunistic routing can leverage the broadcast nature of the wireless channel to improve the performance for CRNs. In this paper we present a coding aware opportunistic routing protocol for multi-channel CRNs, cognitive radio opportunistic routing (CROR) protocol, which jointly considers the probability of successful spectrum utilization, packet loss rate, and coding opportunities. We evaluate and compare the proposed scheme against three other opportunistic routing protocols with multichannel. It is shown that the CROR, by integrating opportunistic routing with network coding, can obtain much better results, with respect to throughput, the probability of PU-SU packet collision and spectrum utilization efficiency.