Coordination problem in cognitive wireless mesh networks

Due to their potential to create and extend pervasive communication applications to cognitive environments with distributed control, the emerging technology of cognitive wireless mesh networks is gaining significant attention from a growing research community. However, the major challenge in cognitive networks is the adaptation to time and space variability of the available resources, namely chunks of the frequency spectrum called channels. In particular, this problem is exacerbated in cognitive mesh networks because there exists no direct communication among devices which thereby cannot establish a global (common) control channel to coordinate the entire network. Instead, only local control channels that vary depending on the time instant and location, can be established to coordinate cognitive devices among themselves. This paper first analyzes the underlying challenges and existing approaches to address the absence of a static and global control channel, and then propose a novel Control channel formation protocol, called Connor. Our protocol Connor is a fully distributed coordination scheme where cognitive mesh devices self-organize into clusters based on the similarity of available channels and on topological constraints. Compared with the existing clustering algorithms, which requires synchronization, the proposed Connor performs better in most cases without imposing synchronization. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.