Multicasting in Cognitive Radio Networks: Algorithms, Techniques and Protocols

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of algorithms, techniques, and protocols for multicasting in cognitive radio networks, addressing the challenges posed by dynamic spectrum access and spectrum sharing.

Contribution

It offers a detailed tutorial on multicast algorithms and techniques, along with a survey of existing protocols and future research directions in CRN multicasting.

Findings

Various algorithms and techniques for efficient multicast in CRNs are discussed.

A survey of protocols proposed for multicasting in CRNs is provided.

Open research questions and future directions are identified.

Abstract

Multicasting is a fundamental networking primitive utilized by numerous applications. This also holds true for cognitive radio networks (CRNs) which have been proposed as a solution to the problems that emanate from the static non-adaptive features of classical wireless networks. A prime application of CRNs is dynamic spectrum access (DSA), which improves the efficiency of spectrum allocation by allowing a secondary network, comprising of secondary users (SUs), to share spectrum licensed to a primary licensed networks comprising of primary users (PUs). Multicasting in CRNs is a challenging problem due to the dynamic nature of spectrum opportunities available to the SUs. Various approaches, including those based in optimization theory, network coding, algorithms, have been proposed for performing efficient multicast in CRNs. In this paper, we provide a self-contained tutorial on algorithms and techniques useful for solving the multicast problem, and then provide a comprehensive survey of protocols that have been proposed for multicasting in CRNs. We conclude this paper by identifying open research questions and future research directions.