TIGHT: A Geographic Routing Protocol for Cognitive Radio Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

This paper presents TIGHT, a geographic routing protocol for cognitive radio mobile ad hoc networks. TIGHT offers three routing modes and allows secondary users to fully explore the transmission opportunities over a primary channel without affecting primary users (PUs). The greedy mode routes a packet via greedy geographic forwarding until a PU region is encountered and then further routes the packet around the PU region to where greedy forwarding can resume. It works best when the PUs are only occasionally active. In contrast, the optimal and suboptimal modes route a packet along optimal and suboptimal trajectories to the destination, respectively. They work best when the PUs are active most of the time. The suboptimal mode is computationally more efficient than the optimal mode at the cost of using suboptimal trajectories in rare cases. The efficacy of TIGHT is confirmed by extensive simulations.