This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts

for publication in the ICC 2007 proceedings.

Joint On-demand Routing and Spectrum Assignment in Cognitive Radio Networks

Geng Cheng, Wei Liu, Yunzhao Li, Wenqing Cheng
Dept. of Electronics and Information Engineering, Huazhong University of Science & Technology, China E-mail:chenggeng79@gmail.com
Abstract In Cognitive Radio Networks, nodes can work on different frequency bands. Existing routing proposals help nodes select frequency bands without considering the effect of band switching and intra-band backoff. In this paper, We propose a joint interaction between on-demand routing and spectrum scheduling. A node analytical model is proposed to describe the scheduling-based channel assignment progress, which relief the inter-ow interference and frequent switching delay. We also use an on-demand interaction to derive a cumulative delay based routing protocol. Simulation results show that, comparing to other approaches, our protocol provides better adaptability to the multiow environment and derives paths with much lower cumulative delay. Index Terms Cognitive Radio Network, Spectrum Assignment, Scheduling, Routing

I. I NTRODUCTION As a promising solution to scarce spectrum resource, Cognitive Radio (CR) [1] was proposed to enable unlicensed users to sense and intelligently access the unoccupied spectrum. In multi-hop Cognitive Radio Network (CRN), the CR nodes sense spectrum and get available frequency bands, named as Spectrum Opportunities (SOP) [2], then select one candidate from SOP via specic policy, which will not interfere with licensed nodes. Routing in multi-hop CRN faces several new challenges: Firstly, unlike other wireless networks, the CRN topology will change according to the spectrum switching progress in CR nodes, thus the spectrum information should be considered in routing. Similar work was done in wireless multi-channel networks, which aims to nd effective routes and assign channels. Some approaches [2], [6], [7] were proposed based on centralized infrastructure to achieve overall optimal network performance. However, those proactive methods cannot be deployed in multi-hop CRN, where both the node positions and spectrum distribution are hard to obtain. Other approaches [4], [5], [14] were proposed based on on-demand manner to reactively select routes and assign channels simultaneously. In those works, the information of channel usage is disseminated by on-demand routing process. Secondly, the evaluation metrics for routing with spectrum assignment are still open issues. The authors in [5], [14] argued that too many channel switchings would degrade the routing performance, and proposed to avoid channel switching. While
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 60572049) and (No. 60602029), and the Open Foundation of Key Laboratory of Intelligent Internet Technology of Hubei Province, China (No.HSIT-200605)

the authors in [3], [4] claimed that active channel switching would nd best route, and proposed to select distinct channels within certain hopss range. We named these two opposite approaches as Switch-aware [5], [14] and K -hop distinct [3], [4] respectively. However, neither of them considered the additional delay caused by channel switching. As reported in [15], switching between frequency bands would bring switching delay, for example, tuning delays could be of the order of 10ms for a 10MHz step in the spectrum range 20MHz3GHz [13]. Our original motivation is that, cumulative delay along routing will be more practical to evaluate routing performance in multi-hop CRN. In our previous work [8], a Spectrum-aware On-demand Routing Protocol(SORP) was proposed. Both the switching delay between channels and the backoff delay within channel were considered to select routes. In this paper, we further investigate the scheduling-based channel assignment progress in CR nodes, and nd that queueing delay plays an important role in end-to-end delay in CRN. We combine routing and spectrum assignment together, and propose a Delay motivated On-demand Routing Protocol(DORP). This joint approach can reach an optimal frequency band switch decision and then select effective routes. Simulation results show that DORP outperforms the current similar routing approaches. The contribution of this paper includes:

A delay based metric is proposed to evaluate the effectiveness of candidate routes. It is more measurable and practical than the subjective metrics in [3][5], [14]. A node analytical model is proposed to describe the scheduling-based channel assignment progress. It can well t the routing environment of dynamic spectrum access with multiple ows. A joint approach of routing and spectrum assignment is proposed between route computing and frequency band selecting which balances performance among queuing delay, backoff overhead and switching cost. II. N ODE A NALYTICAL M ODEL

The challenges stated in the last section raised attention to special functional requirement of nodes in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRN). They need to select not only next hop nodes for relaying data, but also feasible frequency bands to switch. In this section, we present Node Analytical Model (NAM) to selects appropriate frequency bands and determines the order of switching.

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This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the ICC 2007 proceedings.

Input port 1 Input port 2 Input port n

Queue on band 1 Queue on band 2 Queue on band m

flowm Polling among Flows

flown

bandi

bandj

bandp

bandq

(a) Polling among ows Fig. 1. Node Analytical Model

Polling among frequency bands Frequency bandm flowi flowj Frequency bandn

A. Assumptions To ensure that routing protocol messages are received by network nodes despite of the inconsistency between their frequency bands, we assume that each node is equipped with a traditional wireless interface in addition to the Cognitive Radio transceiver, following the suggestion in [14]. A common control channel is then formed by those traditional interfaces, such that all nodes Spectrum Opportunities (SOP) can be shared among network. Although there are other possible methods such as broadcasting on all frequency bands, implementing with off-the-shelf wireless equipments is more practical. Additionally, we assume that every node is able to provide the routing module with its SOP information. This can be achieved by applying cross-layer design, sharing spectrum sensing result between network layer and MAC layer. B. Interaction between nodes On-demand routing is suitable in multi-hop networks. However, Cognitive Radio network nodes running such protocol are not aware of the SOP of each other. To smooth away this inconsistency, we applied modications to the well-known ondemand routing protocol AODV [10] to form an interaction for exchanging SOP information among network nodes. In our protocol, the messages are delivered on the control channel (assumed in Section II-A), and node initiates route discovery procedure by broadcasting a Route Request (RREQ), which piggybacks SOP information. C. Node Analytical Model We use a Node Analytical Model (NAM) to assign spectrum bands for nodes (Figure 1). Borrowing the design idea of standard IP router, a Frequency based Classier(FC) is attached before packet classier to perform by-frequency classication such that information of ows from different frequency bands could be collected. Besides, a Frequency based Scheduler(FS) is placed after packet scheduler to forward ow data through appropriate frequency bands. In FC, incoming ows are described as 2-tuples {source-side band, destination-side band}, indicating the frequency bands a ow claims when traversing the node. The union set of all 2tuples is named the active band set of a node [8]. On the other hand, FS has the responsibility to apply a certain scheduling policy to the traversing ows such that ow packets are mapped onto appropriate frequency bands through appropriate output ports. As stated in Section I, nodes incur switching delay when they change frequency bands. Moreover, transmission of other ows brings queuing delay on current ow, while neighboring

flowp

flowq

(b) Polling among frequency bands Fig. 2. Different scheduling schemes

nodes on identical frequency band also encounter the hiddenterminal and exposed-terminal problems, resulting in backoff delay [9]. Hence, the scheduling policies in Node Analytical Model have to satisfy all the traversing ows while mitigating the three kinds of delay. Figure 2(a) shows a scheduling policy of polling among existing ows. However, the more frequency bands f lowm and f lown employ in common, the more unnecessary switching delay will be incurred. Therefore, we propose that Node Analytical Model rst classify multiple traversing ows according to their frequency bands, then serve those active bands in a round robin manner, and schedule the output according to their ow-ids. The Cognitive Radio transceiver tunes to a frequency band once within a polling cycle, processing all correlated ows (see Figure 2(b)). D. Summary In this section, we present the Node Analytical Model (NAM) in CRN node, and propose that nodes interact under reactive routing protocol for SOP information dissemination. The NAM adaptively selects appropriate frequency bands, and the result is piggybacked by the routing messages. On the other hand, routing messages bring SOP information, based on which the NAM could establish queueing system for the traversing ows. In this way, the delay of nodes along the path are collected and reused as feedback to calculate the path-long delay. III. I MPLEMENTATION AND A NALYSIS We implement the proposed scheme as a protocol, named Delay motivated On-demand Routing Protocol (DORP). It employs on-demand routing to cooperate with Spectrum Assignment Module in nodes for cumulative delay based frequency band selection. A. Formulation of Delay on nodes 1) Modication of Routing Metric: According to [8], a protocol has to evaluate the path delay during the interaction, which includes switching and backoff delay caused by both the path itself and its intersecting ows. The former, called PATH-delay (DP ), depends on the spectrum usage along the path. The latter is called NODE-delay (DN ), it depends on the frequency bands and the number of other intersecting ows. Unlike algorithms in [3], [4] or [5], our protocol should evaluate backoff delay and switching delay in DP and DN , and derive a cumulative delay as routing metric.

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The formulation is under the assumption that every traversing ow is equal in priority. We dene the delay caused by existing ows at a node as: Dnode = Dswitching + Dqueueing + Dbackof f (1)

Choice(node 4) form a close loop at node 3 and provide pathwide information. We state our procedures as follows:

where Dswitching , Dqueueing and Dbackof f are delays caused by frequency band switching, other ows transmissions and interference within a frequency band, respectively. From the 2-tuples of existing ows, we can derive active frequency band set S with M active frequency bands Bandi S (1 i M ), where Bandi < Bandi+1 . We further get the active frequency band set S from N existing traversing ows f lowi = {srci , desti }(1 i N ). Switching from one frequency band to another results in non-zero delay, it depends on the difference between the two bands. Generally, tuning delays could be of the order of 10ms for a 10MHz step in the spectrum range 20MHz3GHz [13]. Therefore, we assume that the switching delay between two frequency bands: Di,j = k |Bandi Bandj |, thus in our scheduling scheme, Dswitching =
1iM 1

Fig. 3.

Closed Loop in On-demand Routing

Di,i+1 + DM,1 (2)

= 2DM,1 = 2k |BandM Band1 |

10ms where k is a positive constant (suggested as 10 M Hz in [13]). Note that at the end of the polling cycle, the node has to tune from BandM back to Band1 , bringing delay DM,1 . On the other hand, when nodes are contending the spectrum resource, they begin the backoff procedure [9], and bring backoff delay. If we get the number of contending nodes N umi on each Bandi , then for f lown0 , queueing delay and backoff delay [12] on Bandi is stated as: N umi 1

1) Route Discovery: [3], [4] proposed that source node assigns channels rst. However, that is under the assumption that all the nodes in the network have the same Spectrum Opportunities (SOP), which is not applicable in Cognitive Radio Network. In our protocol, SOP information is piggybacked by RREQ messages, which is forwarded if and only if there exists intersection between the nodes and the RREQs SOPs. In this way, the RREQ is approaching the destination via routes feasible both in space and spectrum (see Algorithm 1). 2) Route Reply: Once a RREQ message is received, the destination node knows about the SOP distribution of all nodes along the route and then assigns a frequency band to its Cognitive Radio transceiver (see Algorithm 1). After that, it sends a Route Reply (RREP) back to the source, encapsulating the just-assigned frequency band in a list. If an intermediate node receives this RREP, it extracts the frequency band choices in the list, together with the SOP information from previously received RREQ, and assigns an appropriate frequency band (see Algorithm 2). Finally, the node establishes route to the destination via its Cognitive Radio transceiver and generates new RREP message. C. Path Cumulative Delay Based Frequency band Selection As stated in Section III-A.1, the DP and DN are the metrics that incorporated into our on-demand routing protocol. If node i knows the frequency band choice of every node
nodei is destination nodei DN

Dqueueing (Bandi ) =
n=1,n=n0

Pn Bi

(3)

Dbackof f (N umi ) =

1 (1 pc ) 1 (1 pc )
1 N umi 1

W0

(4) where Pn is packet size in f lown , Bi is the bandwidth under Bandi , pc denotes the probability that a contending node experiences collision, and W0 represents the minimum contention window size [9]. From (1)(2)(3)(4), its clear that assigning a new active frequency band for the ow results in larger M and increased Dswitching . On the other hand, letting the ow use existing active frequency band Bandi increases N umi , thus make larger Dqueueing and Dbackof f . B. Delay motivated On-demand Routing Protocol Our protocol inherits the basic procedures of AODV, whose mechanism of RREQ and RREP interaction creates a closed loop for every node on the route. In Figure 3, RREQ carrying SOP(node 1, node 2) together with RREP containing

nodei is intermediate node current SOP has intersection with the closest SOP

nodei DP

DN DP i nodei is source node

nodei is intermediate node

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along the route to destination, it therefore knows if there is hX consecutive nodes operating on frequency band X. Suppose there are altogether H hops between node m and the destination, we have DPm = Dswitching,m + Dbackof f,m where
H

1800 source 1600 1400

s1

s2

s3

s4

s5

s6

s7

(5)

1200 1000 800

d1

Dswitching,m =
j =m

k |Bandj Bandj +1 |

(6)

600 d2 400 d3 200 d4 0 0 200 400 d5 600 d6 800 1000 d7 1200 1400

When deriving the backoff delay, we only consider nodes on the path, since the impacts of traversing ows are represented by DN already. Here nodes are organized similar to a chain topology, thus we employ the idea and derivation of equivalent non-opportunistic bandwidth in [11] to get the backoff delay along the path. Let po be the probability that a node observes the channel available, pa be the probability that node A observes the channel available given that its neighbor B observes the channel available, and qc be the probability that A observes the channel available given that B does not. Then we have Dbackof f as follows: Dbackof f,m = P B
hX +1 2

destination
1600 1800

Fig. 4.

Evaluation Topology

IV. S IMULATION AND E VALUATION We conduct experimental simulations in GloMoSim [16] to quantify the performance of our Delay motivated On-demand Routing Protocol (DORP). Up to 100 nodes are randomly distributed over a 1800 m by 1800 m area, and we set the radio range as 372.214 m according to typical 2.4GHz radio conguration. The evaluation topology is shown in Figure 4. We let the Spectrum Opportunity (SOP) of each node randomly varies within the range of 20MHz2.4GHz, and the number of available frequency bands varies from 2 to 8, to simulate the inconsistency of SOPs among nodes. In addition to SORP proposed in [8], we implemented schemes in [5], [14], [4], which are called Switch-aware and K -hop distinct respectively. A. Adaptability to Varying Spectrum Distribution First, to illustrate the four schemes adaptability to varying spectrum distribution and their transmission performance, we introduce the metric sparsity of spectrum distribution (SSD) [8], which describes the average difference between two consecutive frequency bands in SOP set. Its clear that higher SSD incurs higher switching costs. In the testing topology (Figure 4), the source node is on the top-left and the destination is on bottom-right. We use node pairs from s1 d1 to s7 d7 to simulate existing ows that traverse candidate routes. We start a CBR trafc from the source to the destination with 10000 packets sized 512 bytes each at the interval 0.1s. Figure 5(a) shows the simulation result. The the cumulative delay in Switch-aware scheme remains at a certain level. However, in K -hop distinct scheme, the cumulative delay rises sharply when SSD is above 500MHz, because of the rise of switching delay. SORP scheme takes joint consideration of backoff delay and switching delay, the cumulative delay incurred is fairly lower, but the proposed DORP is the only scheme to take queueing delay at intersecting nodes into consideration, thus result in lowest cumulative delay, especially with several ows.

U (hX ) U (hX )

(7)

where P is packet size, B is the bandwidth under current frequency band and: hX 1pj (1 po )qc 1pa 2 a j is even (8) U (hX )= h X j 1 1pa j 1 (1 p ) q + p p o c 1p2 o a
j is odd
a

On the other hand, DN is an additive value to the cumulative delay of route Droute , which can be presented as:
H

DNm =
m

Dnode

(9)

From (5)(6)(7)(9), we get the metric of cumulative delay along a route: Droute,m = DPm + DNm (10)

Node m assigns appropriate frequency band which achieves minimum Droute,m , such that the route-wide cumulative delay is minimized. D. Summary and Discussion The proposed On-demand Routing cooperates with nodes Spectrum Assignment Module and performs Path Cumulative delay based frequency band selection. which alleviates the impact of traversing ows on the path, takes both switching delay and backoff delay into account, and selects appropriate frequency bands with minimum Droute,m .

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40 Switch aware Khop distinct SORP DORP

55 50 Switch aware Khop distinct SORP DORP

12 10

cumulative delay(ms)

cumulative delay(ms)

35

45 40 35 30 25

number of switching

8 6 4 2 0 4 Switch aware Khop distinct SORP DORP 6 8 10 12 14 16

30

25

20

15 0

200

400

600

800

1000

20 1

sparsity of spectrum distribution(MHz)

number of intersecting flows

number of hops

(a) Cumulative delay with varying spectrum distribution sparsity

(b) Cumulative delay with intersecting ows Fig. 5. Simulation Result

(c) Number of Switching

Note that when SSD is small, it is more likely to be a single channel wireless network, therefore the schemes are of comparative cumulative delay, as Figure 5(a) shows. B. Performance with Intersecting Flows We adjust the number of intersecting ows from 1 to 7 to evaluate the performances upon intersecting ows, and the result is shown in Figure 5(b). In Switch-aware scheme, route faces increasing backoff delay as the number of intersecting ow grows, thus the cumulative delay rises sharply. For K -hop distinct scheme, the route is utilizing several frequency bands at a time, but refuse to backoff on the same band, therefore results in more band switchings and higher cumulative delay. Though SORP takes into account both backoff and switching cost on path and nodes, queueing delay increases as intersecting ow grows. Since DORP has taken into account both PATH-delay and NODE-delay (Section III-A.1), the queueing status at intersecting nodes is thoroughly modeled and considered. When the number of ows grows, it seeks a balance between assigning new frequency bands to allow simultaneous transmission and accommodating some nodes on one band to avoid expensive switching, thus achieves an overall optimal cumulative delay, which changes far more smoothly than the other two as the number of intersecting ows grows. C. Number of frequency band Switching Figure 5(c) shows the comparison among the three schemes of how many frequency band switching it takes in a path. We let the length of the path vary from 4-hop to 15-hop, and the result shows that, similar with SORP, the proposed DORP has done a tradeoff between Switch-aware and K -hop distinct. It is based on the estimated cumulative delay that DORP makes the decision on every hop whether to switch the frequency band or not. V. C ONCLUSIONS We propose an on-demand protocol for routing and spectrum assignment in Cognitive Radio Networks. We also proposed a novel Node Analytical model, which mitigates the side effects of existing ows to the route, including switching delay, queueing delay and backoff delay. We derive the cumulative

delay along a route by path delay and node delay. With full consideration of all possible delays during a multi-hop transmission through Cognitive Radio Network, we develop metrics and mechanism of spectrum assignment. We validate the effectiveness of the protocol by thorough simulation, and nd that the proposed protocol provides good performance and adaptability in both spectrum distribution varying environment and multi-intersecting ow environment. R EFERENCES
[1] Mitola, J., III, Cognitive Radio: An Integrated Agent Architecture for Software Dened Radio, Thesis (PhD), Dept. of Teleinformatics, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden, 2000. [2] C. Xin, B. Xie and Shen, A Novel Layered Graph Model for Topology Formation and Routing in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks, IEEE DySPAN, 2005. [3] M. X. Gong, S. F. Midkiff and Shiwen Mao, Design Principles for Distributed Channel Assignment in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks, IEEE ICC, 2005. [4] M. X. Gong and S. F. Midkiff, Distributed Channel Assignment Protocols: A Cross-Layer Approach, IEEE WCNC, 2005. [5] J. So and N. Vaidya, A Routing Protocol for Utilizing Multiple Channels in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks with a Single Transceiver, UIUC Technical Report, 2004. [6] Q. Wang and H. Zheng, Route and Spectrum Selection in Dynamic Spectrum Networks, IEEE CCNC, 2006. [7] M. Alicherry, R.Bhatia, and L. Li, Joint channel assignment and routing for throughput optimization in multi-radio wireless mesh networks, ACM Mobicom, 2005. [8] G. Cheng, W. Liu, Y. Li and W. Cheng, Spectrum Aware On-demand Routing in Cognitive Radio Networks, to appear in IEEE DySPAN 2007 [9] IEEE Standard for Wireless LAN-Medium Access Control and Physical Layer Specication, P802.11, 1999. [10] C. E. Perkins and E. M. Royer, Ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing, IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, 1999. [11] X. Liu and W. Wang, On the Characteristics of Spectrum-Agile Communication Networks, IEEE DySPAN, 2005. [12] B. Kwak, N. Song and L. E. Miller, Performance Analysis of Exponential Backoff, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 13, 2005. [13] TCI 8067 Spectrum Processor Data Specication, Webpage http://www.tcibr.com/PDFs/8067webs.pdf, 2000. [14] S. Krishnamurthy, M. Thoppian, S. Venkatesan and R. Prakash, Control Channel based MAC-Layer Conguration, Routing and situation Awareness for Cognitive Radio Networks, IEEE MILCOM, 2005. [15] R. Draves, J. Padhye, and B. Zill, Routing in Multi-Radio, Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks, ACM Mobicom, 2004. [16] X. Zeng, R. Bagrodia, and M. Gerla, GloMoSim: A Library for Parallel Simulation of Large-Scale Wireless Networks, The 12th Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Simulations, 1998.

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