Primary user activity is a major bottleneck for existing routing protocols in cognitive radio networks. Typical routing protocols avoid areas that are highly congested with primary users, leaving only a small fragment of available links for secondary route construction. In addition, wireless links are prone to channel impairments such as multipath fading; which renders the quality of the available links highly fluctuating. In this paper, we investigate using cooperative communication mechanisms to reveal new routing opportunities, enhance route qualities, and enable true coexistence of primary and secondary networks. As a result, we propose Undercover: a cooperative routing protocol that utilizes the available location information to assist in the routing process. Specifically, our protocol revisits a fundamental assumption taken by the state of the art routing protocols designed for cognitive radio networks. Using Undercover, secondary users can transmit in the regions of primary users activity through utilizing cooperative communication techniques to null out transmission at primary receivers via beamforming. In addition, the secondary links qualities are enhanced using cooperative diversity. To account for the excessive levels of interference typically incurred due to cooperative transmissions, we allow our protocol to be interference-aware. Thus, cooperative transmissions are penalized in accordance to the amount of negatively affected secondary flows. We evaluate the performance of our proposed protocol via NS2 simulations which show that our protocol can enhance the network goodput by a ratio reaches up to 250 compared to other popular cognitive routing protocols with minimal added overhead.
The significant performance gains introduced by cooperative diversity have motivated some researchers to employ its techniques in the context of cognitive radio networks @cite_2 @cite_18 . For instance, use cooperative diversity to transmit data with higher capacity to maximize throughput @cite_18 . In addition, proposed a cooperative routing protocol in @cite_28 that enhances the end-to-end throughput. Unfortunately, non of these approaches (1) offer new communication opportunities, (2) mitigate the effect of having active primary users on the secondary network, (3) address the inter-path interference problem which increases as a result of cooperative transmission.
@cite_28 @cite_18 @cite_2
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Recent studies demonstrated that dynamic spectrum access can improve spectrum utilization significantly by allowing secondary unlicensed users to dynamically share the spectrum that is not used by the primary licensed users. Cognitive radio was proposed to promote the spectrum utilization by opportunistically exploiting the existence of spectrum "holes." Meanwhile, cooperative relay technology is regarded widely as a key technology for increasing transmission diversity gain in various types of wireless networks, including cognitive radio networks. In this article, we first give a brief overview of the envisioned applications of: cooperative relay technology to CRNs, cooperative transmission of primary traffic by secondary users, cooperative transmission between secondary nodes to improve spatial diversity, and cooperative relay between secondary nodes to improve spectrum diversity. As the latter is a new direction, in this article we focus on this scenario and investigate a simple wireless network, where a spectrum-rich node is selected as the relay node to improve the performance between the source and the destination. With the introduction of cooperative relay, many unique problems should be considered, especially the issue for relay selection and spectrum allocation. To demonstrate the feasibility and performance of cooperative relay for cognitive radio, a new MAC protocol was proposed and implemented in a universal software radio peripheral-based testbed. Experimental results show that the throughput of the whole system is greatly increased by exploiting the benefit of cooperative relay. Throughput maximization is one of the main challenges in cognitive radio ad hoc networks, where the availability of local spectrum resources may change from time to time and hop-by-hop. Cooperative transmission exploits spatial diversity without multiple antennas at each node to increase capacity with reliability guarantees. This idea is particularly attractive in wireless environments due to the diverse channel quality and the limited energy and bandwidth resources. With cooperation, source node and relay node cooperatively transmit data to the destination. In such a virtual multiple antenna transmission system, the capacity of the cooperative link is much larger than that of the direct link from source to destination. In this paper, we will study decentralized and localized algorithms for joint dynamic routing, relay assignment, and spectrum allocation under a distributed and dynamic environment. We develop and analyze low-complexity cooperative diversity protocols that combat fading induced by multipath propagation in wireless networks. The underlying techniques exploit space diversity available through cooperating terminals' relaying signals for one another. We outline several strategies employed by the cooperating radios, including fixed relaying schemes such as amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward, selection relaying schemes that adapt based upon channel measurements between the cooperating terminals, and incremental relaying schemes that adapt based upon limited feedback from the destination terminal. We develop performance characterizations in terms of outage events and associated outage probabilities, which measure robustness of the transmissions to fading, focusing on the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Except for fixed decode-and-forward, all of our cooperative diversity protocols are efficient in the sense that they achieve full diversity (i.e., second-order diversity in the case of two terminals), and, moreover, are close to optimum (within 1.5 dB) in certain regimes. Thus, using distributed antennas, we can provide the powerful benefits of space diversity without need for physical arrays, though at a loss of spectral efficiency due to half-duplex operation and possibly at the cost of additional receive hardware. Applicable to any wireless setting, including cellular or ad hoc networks-wherever space constraints preclude the use of physical arrays-the performance characterizations reveal that large power or energy savings result from the use of these protocols. Cognitive radio (CR) technology enables the opportunistic use of the vacant licensed frequency bands, thereby improving the spectrum utilization. Therefore, considering end-to-end throughput in CR ad-hoc networks is an important research issue because the availability of local spectrum resources may change frequently with the time and locations. In this paper, we propose a cooperative routing protocol in CR ad-hoc networks. An on-demand routing protocol is used to find an end-to-end minimum cost path between a pair of source and destination. The simulation results show that our proposed cooperative routing protocol not only obtains higher end-to-end throughput, but also reduces the end-to-end delay and the amount of control messages compared to previous work.