Statistical Routing for Multihop Wireless Cognitive Networks

Abstract: To account for the randomness of propagation channels and interference levels in hierarchical spectrum sharing, a novel approach to multihop routing is introduced for cognitive random access networks, whereby packets are randomly routed according to outage probabilities. Leveraging channel and interference level statistics, the resultant cross-layer optimization framework provides optimal routes, transmission probabilities, and transmit-powers, thus enabling cognizant adaptation of routing, medium access, and physical layer parameters to the propagation environment. The associated optimization problem is non-convex, and hence hard to solve in general. Nevertheless, a successive convex approximation approach is adopted to efficiently find a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker solution. Augmented Lagrangian and primal decomposition methods are employed to develop a distributed algorithm, which also lends itself to online implementation. Enticingly, the fresh look advocated here permeates benefits also to conventional multihop wireless networks in the presence of channel uncertainty.