Opportunistic Relaying Protocol for Device-to-Device Communication with Cognitive Radio Capability
Ahmed Musa, Israa Alkhshainy, Haythem Bany Salameh, Yaser Jararweh · 2017
Due to the expected exponential growth of traffic volume in 5G-based networks, efficient mechanisms that effectively utilize the underutilized portion of wireless spectrum are needed. Opportunistic spectrum access mechanisms are designed to utilize the available licensed spectrum bands, which can be granted to unlicensed users (secondary users (SUs)) without causing harmful interference to licensed users (primary users (PUs)) devices. Sharing spectrum bands by both PUs and SUs devices enables dynamic spectrum access device-to-device (D2D) communication over cognitive radio networks (CRNs). In such scenarios, the source-destination devices can be connected using either direct path or multi-hop path. In this paper, we propose an opportunistic multi-channel D2D communication protocol that selects the most appropriate path along with the channel assignment between communicating devices such that network performance is enhanced. When selecting paths and assigning channels between communicating devices, our protocol considers the number of available channels, link-quality conditions and channel availability durations of each available channel between the communicating devices. Simulation results show that our proposed protocol can significantly improve network performance.