Network Formation Game for Interference Minimization Routing in Cognitive Radio Mesh Networks

Cognitive radio (CR)-based wireless mesh networks (WMNs) provide a very suitable framework for secondary users’ (SUs’) transmissions. When designing routing techniques in CR-WMNs, we need to consider the aggregate interference from the SUs to PUs. Although the interference from a single SU that is outside the PUs’ footprints is small, the aggregate interference from a great number of SUs transmitting at the same time may be significant, and this will greatly influence the PUs’ performance. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a distributed routing algorithm using the network formation game to minimize the aggregate interference from the SUs to the PUs. The proposed distributed algorithm can avoid the problems in the centralized routing solution, such as the high computation complexity and high information-gathering delay. Simulation results show that the proposed framework can provide better routes in terms of interference to the PUs compared to the Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm, and the distributed solution shows near optimum compared to the upper bound.