Cognitive wireless mesh networks have great flexibility to improve spectrum resource utilization, within which secondary users (SUs) can opportunistically access the authorized frequency bands while being complying with the interference constraint as well as the QoS (Quality-of-Service) requirement of primary users (PUs). In this paper, we consider intercluster connection between the neighboring clusters under the framework of cognitive wireless mesh networks. Corresponding to the collocated clusters, data flow which includes the exchanging of control channel messages usually needs four time slots in traditional relaying schemes since all involved nodes operate in half-duplex mode, resulting in significant bandwidth efficiency loss. The situation is even worse at the gateway node connecting the two colocated clusters. A novel scheme based on network coding is proposed in this paper, which needs only two time slots to exchange the same amount of information mentioned above. Our simulation shows that the network coding-based intercluster connection has the advantage of higher bandwidth efficiency compared with the traditional strategy. Furthermore, how to choose an optimal relaying transmission power level at the gateway node in an environment of coexisting primary and secondary users is discussed. We present intelligent approaches based on reinforcement learning to solve the problem. Theoretical analysis and simulation results both show that the intelligent approaches can achieve optimal throughput for the intercluster relaying in the long run. Copyright (C) 2009 Xianfu Chen et al.
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