Intelligent multicast routing for multimedia over cognitive radio networks: a probabilistic approach

Cognitive radio (CR) technology has been demonstrated as one of the key technologies that can provide the needed spectrum bands for supporting the emerging spectrum-hungry multimedia applications and services in next-generation wireless networks. Multicast routing technique plays a significant role in most of wireless networks that require multimedia data dissemination to a group of destinations through single-hop or multi-hop communication. Performing multimedia multicasting over CR networks can significantly improve the quality of multimedia transmissions by effectively exploiting the available spectrum, reducing network traffic and minimizing communication cost. An important challenge in this domain is how to perform a multi-cast transmissions over multiple hops in a dynamically varying CR environment while maintaining high-quality received video streaming to all multi-case CR receivers without affecting the performance of legacy primary radio networks (PRNs). In this paper, we investigate the problem of multicast multimedia streaming in multi-hop CR networks (CRNs). Specifically, we propose an intelligent multicast routing protocol for multi-hop ad hoc CRNs that can effectively support multimedia streaming. The proposed protocol consists of path selection and channel assignment phases for the different multi-cast receivers. It is based on the shortest path tree (SPT) that implements the expected transmission count metric (ETX). The channel selection is based on the ETX, which is a function of the probability of success (POS) over the different channels that depends on the channel-quality and availability. Simulation results verify the significant improvement achieved by the proposed protocol compared to other existing multicast routing protocols under different network conditions.

     

大规模认知无线电网络的时延分析

时延作为无线网络的最基本的性能之一,对网络信息分发、路由协议设计、节点部署等都具有重要意义。与传统的无线网络不同,认知无线电网络的频谱资源具有动态变化性,该特性会对网络时延产生极大的影响。因此,如何对动态频谱环境下的大规模认知无线电网络进行时延分析,是一项很具挑战性的课题。为此,首先对动态频谱环境进行建模,将认知用户的频谱接入过程建模为一个连续时间的马尔可夫链,并建立认知用户的生存函数来量化授权用户活动以及信道数量对频谱环境的影响;其次,将上述模型与首次通过渗流理论结合起来,研究了大规模认知无线电网络时延的伸缩规律,并获取了更为精确的时延与距离比的上限值。理论分析及仿真结果表明,动态频谱环境与密度一样会对时延产生极大影响。研究结论对认知无线电网络的设计具有重要的指导意义。     

认知无线电网络路由协议综述

认知无线电网络中的节点具有动态频谱接入的特点,进而产生可用频谱的不规则性,这与传统无线多跳网络有很大不同,从而导致了认知无线电网络路由面临新的挑战.在介绍认知无线电网络路由的特点之后,对路由协议进行了初步分类.然后着重分析了目前认知无线电网络较为重要的路由协议的主要机制,详细比较了路由协议的主要类别和特点,最后总结了好的认知无线电网络路由协议的特点,并对未来发展趋势进行了初步展望.     

Collaborative jamming and collaborative defense in cognitive radio networks

In cognitive radio networks, cognitive nodes operate on a common pool of spectrum where they opportunistically access and use parts of the spectrum not being used by others. Though cooperation among nodes is desirable for efficient network operations and performance, there might be some malicious nodes whose objective could be to hinder communications and disrupt network operations. The absence of a central authority or any policy enforcement mechanism makes these kinds of open-access network more vulnerable and susceptible to attacks.In this paper, we analyze a common form of denial-of-service attack, i.e., collaborative jamming. We consider a network in which a group of jammers tries to jam the channels being used by legitimate users who in turn try to evade the jammed channels. First, we compute the distribution of the jamming signal that a node experiences by considering a random deployment of jammers. Then, we propose different jamming and defending schemes that are employed by the jammers and legitimate users, respectively. In particular, we model and analyze the channel availability when the legitimate users randomly choose available channels and the jammers jam different channels randomly. We propose a multi-tier proxy-based cooperative defense strategy to exploit the temporal and spatial diversity for the legitimate secondary users in an infrastructure-based centralized cognitive radio network. Illustrative results on spectrum availability rates show how to improve resiliency in cognitive radio networks in the presence of jammers.     

Probabilistic quality-aware routing in cognitive radio networks under dynamically varying spectrum opportunities

In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic routing metric that considers the peculiar characteristics of the operating environment of cognitive radio networks (CRNs). This metric captures the dynamic changes in channel availabilities due to the randomness of primary user’s activity and the rich channel diversity due to the fact that a CRN is expected to operate over highly separated frequency channels with different propagation characteristics. Our metric, Probability of Success (PoS), statistically quantifies the chances of a successful cognitive radio (CR) packet transmission over a given channel. Based on the PoS metric, we propose a joint probabilistic routing and channel assignment protocol for multi-hop CRNs that attempts at selecting the path with the maximum probability of success among all possible paths for a given CR source-destination pair. Selecting such a path results in minimizing the number of disruptions to CR packet transmissions, which consequently improves network throughput. Simulation results verify the significant throughput improvement achieved by our protocol compared to reference CRN routing protocols.     

认知协作网络中安全传输策略

认知协作网络是一种基于协作通信技术的认知无线电网络,不仅解决了不同网络在特定的时间与空间中频谱资源分配不均的问题,而且可以通过主次用户间的协作提高网络性能.但随着各种无线技术和移动应用日益丰富,由于无线信道的固有特性,服务质量会因安全问题造成性能损失与波动.针对认知协作网络中,因受到恶意用户攻击,引起的网络传输性能下降的问题,提出基于区块链的安全协作传输策略.首先,采用区块链进行身份认证,避免数据污染而导致传输性能的损失与波动;然后采用RS(Reed-Solomon)码编码来提升纠错能力,进一步提高网络性能的稳定性.仿真结果进一步证明了所提出的方案优于现有的认知协作网络传输方式,具有较高的安全稳定性.     

基于时间预测的多跳频谱切换算法研究

针对集中控制认知无线网络,在考虑频谱异构特性的同时,为保证频谱切换业务的服务质量,提出了一种多跳频谱切换算法。通过建立用户移动模型来预测分配信道的可使用时间;设计出路径中不同类型节点的路由处理方法;认知基站根据预测最短路径时间和路由请求包中的时间戳来选择最优路径。仿真结果表明,提出的多跳频谱切换算法能够大大降低切换阻塞概率,提高信道利用率;用户移动对信道可使用时间有着显著的影响。     

认知无线电网络中QoS组播路由调度

在多跳认知无线电网络中,组播的信息通常要经由多个中间节点的转发才能到达最终的目的节点。现有的研究中已经有很多的组播路由协议,然而这些协议都是基于传统无线网络的,并不适合新型的认知无线电网络。本文解决的的问题是:在多跳无线网络中,给定一个具有QoS要求的组播请求,如何建立组播路由以及对路径节点进行传输调度,使得在满足QoS要求下整个传输过程的带宽消耗最小。本文提出了一个分布式的组播路由协议来解决该问题,该协议不仅实现了路由过程的建立,同时还完成了对节点传输过程的合理调度。实验结果证明本文的传输调度策略能有效地减少网络的带宽消耗,同时增加组播请求响应的成功率。     

基于频谱感知的认知Ad hoc网络分簇算法

为了提高认知Ad hoc网络频谱感知效率,解决认知Ad hoc网络分簇问题,本文提出一种基于频谱感知的认知Ad hoc网络分簇算法。通过引入检测因子,综合考虑多个主用户信号交叠与阴影衰落的情况,将认知Ad hoc网络中的次用户节点与需要检测的主用户信道建模为二部图模型,使得分簇问题简化为最大权边二部图（Constraint maximum-weight edge biclique, C-MWEB）分解问题,并设计一种贪婪算法对其求解。仿真结果表明,在多个主用户信号交叠与阴影衰落并存的情况下,相较于传统算法,本文算法分簇更为合理,具有更好的有效性与可靠性。     

一种多信道Ad hoc认知无线电网络密钥交互协议*

针对现有密钥协商协议没有考虑Ad hoc认知无线电网络多信道这一缺陷,提出一种多信道密钥协商协议（multi channels key agreement protocol,MCKAP）,通过建立多重图和替换广播操作减少信道冲突,优化协商路径提高共享密钥协商效率,利用信道属性为节点间选择合理位置,避免主用户干扰。该方案能有效地利用多信道提高共享密钥协商效率。最后通过理论分析和仿真实验证明该协议适用于Ad hoc认知无线电网络,具有较好的执行效率。     

System model and performance estimation of dynamic spectrum allocation strategy with multi-channel and imperfect sensing

The concept of cognitive radio networks (CRNs) is a promising candidate for enhancing the utilization of existing radio spectrum. In CRNs, secondary users (SUs) are allowed to use the spectrum unused by primary users (PUs). In order to mathematically estimate the system performance of dynamic spectrum allocation strategy with multi-channel and imperfect sensing, we propose a novel preemptive priority queueing model. We establish a discrete-time Markov chain in line with the stochastic behaviour of SU and PU packets. Then, we derive some performance measures, such as the interference rate of PU packets, the normal throughput and the average delay of SU packets. Moreover, we provide theoretical and simulation experiments to investigate the system performance. Numerical experiments show that there is a tradeoff between different performance measures when imperfect sensing is considered. Finally, we present an optimal design for setting the number of the channels in a spectrum.     

Highly-Efficient Bulk Data Transfer for Structured Dissemination in Wireless Embedded Network Systems

Recent years have witnessed the remarkable development of wireless embedded network systems (WENS) such as cyber-physical systems and sensor networks. Reliable bulk data dissemination is an important building module in WENS, supporting various applications, e.g., remote software update, video distribution. The existing studies often construct network structures to enable time-slotted multi-hop pipelining for data dissemination. However, the adopted transmission mechanism was originally designed for structureless protocols, and thus posing significant challenges on efficient structured data dissemination. In this paper, we investigate the problem of structured bulk data dissemination. Specifically, we propose reliable out-of-order transmission and bursty encoding mechanisms to transmit packets as many as possible in each transmission slot. As a consequence, the resulting transmission protocol (ULTRA) can fully utilize each transmission slot and propagate data in the network as fast as possible. The performance results obtained from both testbed and simulation experiments demonstrate that, compared to the state-of-the-art protocols, ULTRA can greatly enhance the dissemination performance by reducing the dissemination delay by 34.8%.     

Distributed multi-hop cooperative communication in dense wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we investigate the use of cooperative communications for high performance data dissemination in dense wireless sensor networks. We first identify the limitations of existing cooperative schemes. While we previously proposed a multi-hop cooperative data dissemination scheme, REER, to address these limitations, the construction of such structure relies on a pre-established reference path. The partially centralized approach makes REER unscalable when encountering network dynamics. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel distributed multi-hop cooperative communication scheme (DMC), which is fully distributed and consists of two operation phases: (1) cooperative mesh structure (CMS) construction, and (2) CMS-based data dissemination, which includes random value-based scheme and distance-based scheme for forwarding node selection. Simulation results show that DMC performs well in terms of a number of QoS metrics, and fits well in large-scale networks and highly dynamic environments.     

Design and performance evaluation of ContentPlace,a social-aware data dissemination system for opportunistic networks

In this paper we present and evaluate ContentPlace, a data dissemination system for opportunistic networks, i.e., mobile networks in which stable simultaneous multi-hop paths between communication endpoints cannot be provided. We consider a scenario in which users both produce and consume data objects. ContentPlace takes care of moving and replicating data objects in the network such that interested users receive them despite possible long disconnections, partitions, etc. Thanks to ContentPlace, data producers and consumers are completely decoupled, and might be never connected to the network at the same point in time. The key feature of ContentPlace is learning and exploiting information about the social behaviour of the users to drive the data dissemination process. This allows ContentPlace to be more efficient both in terms of data delivery and in terms of resource usage with respect to reference alternative solutions. The performance of ContentPlace is thoroughly investigated both through simulation and analytical models.     

Opportunistic medium access control for maximizing packet delivery rate in dynamic access networks

One of the key challenges to enabling efficient cognitive radio (CR) communications is how to perform opportunistic medium access control (MAC) that maximizes spectrum efficiency. Several CRN MAC protocols have been designed assuming relatively static primary radio (PR) channels with average idle durations largely exceed CR transmission times. For such CR environment, typical multichannel MAC protocols, which select the best quality channel, perform reasonably well. However, when such mechanism is employed in a CRN that coexists with highly dynamic licensed PR networks (PRNs), where PR channel idle durations are comparable to CR transmission times, the forced-termination rate for CR transmission can significantly increase, leading to a reduction in network throughput. To reduce the forced-termination rate, many MAC protocols have been proposed to account for the dynamic time-varying nature of PR channels by requiring communicating CR users to consistently perform channel switching according to PR activities. However, such channel-switching strategy introduces significant overhead and latency, which negatively affect network throughput. Hence, in this paper, we propose a probabilistic channel quality- and availability-aware CRN MAC. Our protocol uses a novel channel assignment mechanism that attempts at maximizing the packet success probability of each transmission and hence avoids the significant overhead and latency of channel switching. Simulation results show that by being quality- and availability-aware, our protocol provides better spectrum utilization by decreasing the forced-termination rate and improving network throughput.     

A cross-layer protocol of spectrum mobility and handover in cognitive LTE networks

Cognitive radio technique is the next step toward efficient wireless bandwidth utilization. While some of the spectrum bands (unlicensed band) have been increasingly used, most of the other spectrum resources (licensed band) are underutilized. This drives the challenges of open spectrum and dynamic spectrum access concepts, which allows unlicensed users (or called secondary users, SUs) equipped with cognitive radios to opportunistically access the spectrum not used by licensed users (or called primary users, PUs). Most existing results mainly focus on designing the lower-layer cognitive radio problems. In the literature, this is the first result to investigate the higher-layer solution for cognitive radio networks. In this paper, we present a cross-layer protocol of spectrum mobility (layer-2) and handover (layer-3) in cognitive LTE networks. With the consideration of the Poisson distribution model of spectrum resources, a cross-layer handoff protocol with the minimum expected transmission time is developed in cognitive LTE networks. Performance analysis of the proposed handoff protocol is investigated. Finally, simulation results illustrates the proposed handoff protocol significantly reduces the expected transmission time and the spectrum mobility ratio.     

RAC: Range Adaptive Cognitive Radio Networks

In recent years, cognitive radio has received a great attention due to tremendous potential to improve the utilization of the radio spectrum by efficiently reusing and sharing the licensed spectrum bands, as long as the interference power inflicted on the primary users of the band remains below a predefined threshold level. Cognitive radio allows the secondary users in the cognitive radio network to access the licensed spectrum of the primary users opportunistically. In this paper, an autonomous distributed adaptive transmission range control scheme for cognitive radio networks which is called the RAC is proposed. The RAC considers the QoS requirements of both the primary and the secondary users simultaneously. The cognitive user's maximization of its achievable throughput without interfering the primary user by adapting transmission range of the secondary users dynamically is the key feature of the RAC. One of the advantages of using the proposed scheme is its implementation simplicity. The RAC is compared to other cognitive radio schemes in a simulation environment by using ns2. Simulations indicate that, the RAC can well fit into the mobile cognitive radio ad hoc networks and improve the network performance. Having compared to the other schemes utilizing contemporary cognitive radio technology, the RAC provides better adaptability to the environment and maximizes throughput and minimizes data delivery latency.     

Self adaptive routing for dynamic spectrum access in cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio technology inherently possesses self adaptivity. In order to design self adaptive mobile cognitive radio networks, routing is one of the key challenging issues to be addressed. In this paper, a novel self adaptive routing (SAR) algorithm for multi-hop cognitive radio ad hoc networks is proposed. The proposed routing algorithm incorporates with routing metrics and autonomous distributed adaptive transmission range control mechanism to provide self adaptivity. SAR aims to choose optimal routes at the outset of routing and aims to retain optimal route by the use of route adaptation and route preservation. SAR is compared with previously suggested algorithms to indicate performance differences. Extensive experimental evaluations are performed in the ns2 simulator. It is shown that the SAR provides better adaptability to the environment than the previously suggested algorithms and maximizes throughput, minimizes end-to-end delay in a number of realistic scenarios and significantly improves routing performance.     

Distributed cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio for ad hoc networks

Cognitive radio refers to an intelligent radio with the capability of sensing the radio environment and dynamically reconfiguring the operating parameters. Recent research has focused on using cognitive radios in ad hoc environments. Spectrum sensing is the most important aspect of successful cognitive radio ad hoc network deployment to overcome spectrum scarcity. Multiple cognitive radio users can cooperate to sense the primary user and improve sensing performance. Cognitive radio ad hoc networks are dynamic in nature and have no central point for data fusion. In this paper, gradient-based fully distributed cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio is proposed for ad hoc networks. The licensed band used for TV transmission is considered the primary user. The gradient field changes with the energy sensed by cognitive radios, and the gradient is calculated based on the components, which include energy sensed by secondary users and received from neighbors. The proposed scheme was evaluated from the perspective of reliable sensing, convergence time, and energy consumption. Simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.     

Adaptive Auction Framework for Spectrum Market in Cognitive Radio Networks

For the recent decade, cognitive radio networks have received much attention as an alternative to the traditional static spectrum allocation policy since the licensed spectrum channels are not being used efficiently. The most critical issue of the cognitive radio networks is how to distribute the idle spectrum channels to the secondary users opportunistically. The auction-based market is desirable for the trade of idle spectrum channels since the secondary users can purchase a channel in timely manner and the licensed primary users can earn the additional profit while not using the channels. Among the auction algorithms proposed for the spectrum market, we focus on the TASG framework, which consists of two nested auction algorithms, because it enables the group-buying of spectrum channels for the secondary users with limited budgets, and possesses many positive properties such as budget-balance, individual rationality and truthfulness. However, the TASG framework is not very attractive to the market participants since the seller earns the small revenue and the buyer has the low utility. In this paper, we propose a new auction framework for the spectrum markets, called aDaptive and Economically robust Auction-based Leasing (DEAL), that keeps all the benefits of TASG while improving the utility (or revenue) of the participants. To this end, we develop an enhanced inner-auction algorithm, called the Global Auction algorithm in our DEAL framework, and adapt the involved parameters dynamically based on the previous bids from the potential buyers. Simulation results demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms the previous TASG.