Cooperative spectrum mobility in heterogeneous opportunistic networks using cognitive radio

Abstract

With the advent of smarter technologies in cellular networks, often the bands used for lower versions remain unoccupied. To utilize that, in this paper, a new paradigm of cognitive radio has been proposed, where the nodes of a self-organized opportunistic ad hoc network act as the secondary users (SU) to use the white spaces of the existing cellular network. Each SU can freely move around, and in a self-organized fashion may collaborate with other neighboring SUs to gather information on the channels assigned to the cells of the primary network for cognitive use of the licensed spectrum with reduced spectrum latency. Simulation studies show that our proposed cooperative approach significantly improves the call drop/ block rate, and also results better QoS compared to the non-cooperative approach at the cost of negligible additional message overhead.