High-throughput transmission-quality-aware broadcast routing in cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio is an enabling technology of dynamic spectrum access (DSA) networking. In DSA, unlicensed secondary users can coexist with primary licensed users and can share the radio spectrum opportunistically. Broadcasting is an important networking primitive that is useful for many CRN applications such as control information dissemination, warning notification, etc. Unfortunately, the sporadic channels availability degrades the performance of broadcast routing. The quality of a broadcast transmission on a particular channel depends on the channel quality of all the receivers for the same transmitter. Current broadcast routing protocols lack transmission quality awareness. In this paper, we develop a transmission quality-aware broadcasting framework, comprising algorithm for transmission quality-aware broadcast routing in multi-radio dynamic-spectrum-access CRNs, and formulate a transmission quality metric wherein we consider a receiver-centric view rather than a transmission-centric view. We perform a detailed simulation performance evaluation of our proposed framework using OMNeT++. The proposed broadcast routing algorithm is validated by comparing results with state-of-the-art routing algorithms. Analysis of the results shows average performance gains of approximately 40 % in throughput and packet delivery ratio.