Spectrum Aware Routing in Cognitive Radio Mesh Networks

Cognitive radio technology holds great promises in enabling unlicensed operation in licensed bands, to meet the increasing demand for radio spectrum. The new open spectrum operation necessitates novel routing protocols to exploit the available spectrum opportunistically. In this paper we present SAMER, a routing solution for cognitive radio mesh networks. SAMER opportunistically routes traffic across paths with higher spectrum availability and quality via a new routing metric. It balances between long-term route stability and short-term opportunistic performance. SAMER builds a runtime forwarding mesh that is updated periodically and offers a set of candidate routes to the destination. The actual forwarding path opportunistically adapts to the dynamic spectrum conditions and exploits the link with the highest spectrum availability at the time. We evaluate SAMER through both analysis and simulations, and show that it effectively exploits the available network spectrum and results in higher end-to-end performance.