On the route priority for cognitive radio networks

To fully unleash the potentials of the cognitive radio (CR) paradigm, new challenges must be addressed. Specifically, as regards the network layer, the problem of the route priority, i.e., the problem of prioritizing the routes for the CR packet transmission, is crucial, since the communication opportunities provided by a route are deeply affected by the primary-user (PU) activity. Furthermore, whenever the CR network layer exploits proactively acquired information on the PU activity, update packets need to be exchanged among the CR users, inducing so a route overhead independently of the adopted routing protocol. Hence, in this paper, we analytically derive the optimal route priority rule, i.e., the route priority rule maximizing the achievable capacity, by jointly accounting for the PU activity and the route overhead. To this aim, at first, we formulate the optimal route priority problem, and we prove that its computational complexity through exhaustive search is exponential. Then, we provide the closed-form expressions of the achievable capacity. Stemming from these expressions, we derive the optimal route priority, and we design a computational-efficient search algorithm. All the theoretical results are derived by adopting two routing strategies and two PU activity models.