Interference Aware Routing Using Network Formation Game in Cognitive Radio Mesh Networks

In cognitive radio (CR) wireless mesh networks (WMNs), wireless mesh routers work as secondary users (SUs) that can opportunistically and intelligently access the idle licensed spectrum. When developing efficient routing techniques in CR networks, the aggregate interference from the SUs to the primary users (PUs) should be considered. Though 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. In this paper, a distributed routing algorithm is proposed 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 approach, such as the high cost for building the centralized coordinate nodes, high information-gathering delay, and system breakdown caused by the possible failures in the centralized nodes. From the simulation results, we can observe that the proposed algorithm can find the routes with lower interference to the PUs compared to the Dijkstra's algorithm. Compared to an upper bound, the distributed solution shows near optimum.