Design and analysis of routing protocol for cognitive radio ad hoc networks in Heterogeneous Environment

Multi-hop routing protocol in cognitive radio mobile ad hoc networks (CRMANETs) is a critical issue. Furthermore, the routing metric used in multi-hop CRMANETs should reflect the bands availability, the links quality, the PU activities and quality of service (QoS) requirements of SUs. For the best of our knowledge, many of researchers investigated the performance of the different routing protocols in a homogeneous environment only. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous cognitive radio routing protocol (HCR) operates in heterogeneous environment (i.e. the route from source to destination utilize the licensed and unlicensed spectrum bands). The proposed routing protocol is carefully developed to make a tradeoff between the channel diversity of the routing path along with the CRMANETs throughput. Using simulations, we discuss the performance of the proposed HCR routing protocol and compare it with the AODV routing protocol using a discrete-event simulation which we developed using JAVA platform.