Clustering-based mobile gateway management in integrated CRAHN-cloud network

The limited storage and computing capacity hinder the development of cognitive radio ad hoc networks (CRAHNs). To solve the problem, a new paradigm of cloud-based CRAHN has been proposed, in which a CRAHN will make use of the computation and storage resources of the cloud. This paper envisions an integrated CRAHN-cloud network architecture. In this architecture, some cognitive radio users (CUs) who satisfy the required metrics could perform as mobile gateway candidates to connect other ordinary CUs with the cloud. These mobile gateway candidates are dynamically clustered according to different related metrics. Cluster head and time-to-live value are determined in each cluster. In this paper, the gateway advertisement and discovery issues are first addressed to propose a hybrid gateway discovery mechanism. After that, a QoS-based gateway selection algorithm is proposed for each CU to select the optimal gateway. Simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance of the overall scheme, which incorporates the proposed clustering and gateway selection algorithms. The results show that the proposed scheme can achieve about 11% higher average throughput, 10% lower end-to-end delay, and 8% lower packet drop fractions compared with the existing scheme.