Power Analysis and Comparison of Reactive Routing Protocols for Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks

Cognitive radio networks hold the key to achieving better radio bandwidth utilization and improving the quality of wireless applications. In this paper we design a scenario for cognitive routing to improve wireless ad hoc network performance in terms of power consumption in transmit, receive and ideal modes, as well as reducing the collision of relaying on the network, without declining end-to-end capacity. The basic idea of cognitive radio networks is that the unlicensed devices (cognitive radio users or secondary users) need to vacate the spectrum band once the licensed device (primary user) is detected. Cognitive capability and re-configurability are the key characteristics of cognitive radio. Routing is also an important issue in Mobile Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks. Routing metrics are designed to replace the conventional shortest path routing metric (hop count) used in many existing routing protocols (e.g. AODV, DSR and DYMO).We used well known network simulator QualNet version 5.0 to compare QoS parameters viz., throughput, average end to end delay, average jitter and hop count and the time at which first packet is been received for DSR, AODV and DYMO.