A Software Radio Implementation of Centralized MAC Protocol for Cognitive Radio Networks

In the past decade the cognitive radio paradigm received great attention from academia and industry as a promising approach to solve the spectrum shortage problem. In spite of the intense research activity in the field of cognitive radio, we still register a limited number of network implementations based upon the cognitive radio principles. In this work, we present the design and implementation of a proprietary medium access control protocol that we have conjectured using Standard ECMA-392 as reference. In the proposed design, the network uses an out-of-band cognitive control channel for network management operations. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) a working prototype of a cognitive network managed in centralized fashion by a master device, but within which devices communicate in peer-to-peer mode; 2) the implementation of the proposed medium access control protocol on the universal software radio peripherals, using the open source software GNU radio; 3) the presentation of significant data acquired during the field test of our prototype: we have computed the average network reconfiguration delay when the cognitive control channel is jammed by the primary user and we have measured the capability of the cognitive network to reconstruct channel occupation history by means of distributed spectrum sensing. The prototype has been designed to operate in the 375-445 MHz frequency bands for a potential application in public safety ad-hoc networks.JRC.G.6-Security technology assessmen