Analysis of Cognitive Radio Enabled Flooding in Opportunistic Networks

Abstract

Epidemic routing (Flooding) is considered as a simple routing protocol for opportunistic networks where the participants attempt to transmit whatever information they have to everyone who does not already have that information. However, it is plagued with disadvantages of resource scarcity as it exerts stress on available bandwidth as well as storage capacity of the devices in the network. Cognitive radio (CR) is one of the emerging technologies that can improve the bandwidth utilization by smart allocation of spectrum radio bands. Ideally speaking, a spectrum-aware cognitive radio is able to sense the local spectrum usage and adapt its own radio parameters accordingly. In this study, we have performed experiments to analyze the gains achieved by flooding protocol using cognitive radios of varying capabilities in opportunistic networks. We have performed experiments on three opportunistic networks obtained from real-life traces from different environments and presented results showing variance in delivery efficiency as well as cost incurred on those scenarios. Our results show that performance of flooding can be significantly improved using CRs in bandwidth-scarce environments; however, the improvement is not uniform with the increase in a number of available bands.