QoS-Enabled Spectrum-Aware Routing for Disaster Relief and Tactical Operations over Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks

The effectiveness of public safety communications and its functionally equivalent military counterparts have always been a main priority for governments. Such a motivation is boosted by the increased perception of risks of natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes, along with unmanageable terrorism contingencies and possible cross-border tactical military operations. These emergency situations necessitate prioritization of the limited communications resources, flexibility in accessing available communication channels, and providing differentiated services to a wide range of applications used by public safety organizations and military forces. Such differentiated services include but are not limited to texting, voice call, imaging and video streaming. For this reason, the applications that require a flow-based QoS contract in a Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Network (CRAHN) environment need a convenient route set up procedure. In this paper, we introduce the concept of sustainability, a new route selection metric, and then formulate and solve the problem of providing end-to-end QoS-enabled flows in an on-demand spectrum-aware fashion for CRAHNs. We further provide a routing protocol and demonstrate that it operates optimally. Our protocol thoroughly considers PU-awareness, distributed spectrum assignment, MAC layer access technology, and end-to-end QoS requirements. We provide contributions to the literature with a novel QoS-enabled on-demand cross-layer routing protocol, and a new route selection model for distributed channel assignment process in a dynamic spectrum access environment.