Social-aware routing for cognitive radio–based vehicular ad hoc networks

Cognitive radio–based vehicular ad hoc networks can solve the problem of limited spectrum resource and growing vehicular communication service demands in intelligent transportation systems, and thus, it receives much concern recently. In cognitive radio–based vehicular ad hoc networks, the high mobility of vehicles and the dynamic spectrum activity of cognitive radio make routing in such networks a great challenge. Some routing researches have been proposed in cognitive radio–based vehicular ad hoc networks with single-objective optimization and neglecting the nodes’ social behaviors which can improve the network performance. From this perspective, we propose a social-aware routing scheme for cognitive radio–based vehicular ad hoc networks, with the purpose of increasing the packet delivery ratio and decreasing the overhead ratio. First, we analyze the social centrality of primary users to offer an accuracy spectrum hole measurement. Moreover, we develop a social community partition algorithm to divide secondary users into intra-community and inter-community groups. Furthermore, considering the tradeoff between the packet delivery ratio and the overhead ratio, we adopt different replication policies and forwarding ranks in different community communication processes. In the intra-community communication process, we employ the single-copy policy and the contact duration rank. In the inter-community communication process, we utilize the optimized-binary-tree replication policy and the bridge coefficient rank. Simulation results show that our social-aware routing scheme achieves the higher package delivery ratio and the lower overhead ratio when compared with the existing cognitive radio–based vehicular ad hoc networks routing schemes and other standard routing schemes.