Cognitive Radio Ad-Hoc Network Architectures: A Survey

Combating the growing necessity of radio spectrum, which is a limited natural resource, proper utilization of the radio spectrum is a must. Cognitive radio network (CRN) plays a vibrant role to solve this spectrum scarcity problem. Cognitive radio uses an open spectrum allocation technique to make more efficient utilization of the wireless radio spectrum and reduces the bottleneck on the frequency bands. Thus, accessible spectrum information is required for communication in CRN, which can be acquired by using spectrum database or by spectrum sensing. In addition, a robust architecture with appropriate communication protocol is preconditioned in the deployment of CRN. The state of the art of cognitive radio ad-hoc network architecture is surveyed in this paper, where the paper specifies the formation mechanisms and performance evaluations of the studied architectures. The reviewed papers have addressed some vital issues for the concrete deployment of cognitive radio ad-hoc network; however, there remain some issues that need to be addressed. Thus, this paper conveys a thorough and abstract understanding of cognitive radio ad-hoc network architecture, and also points out some open research issues in this area.