Cooperative and fair MAC protocols for cognitive radio ad-hoc networks

A secondary user (SU) in multichannel cognitive radio ad hoc network (CRAHN) has a limited transmission range, which may raise a hidden multichannel sensing problem. In addition, CRAHNs can be deployed ubiquitously, and SUs from any CRAHNs could co-exist utilizing the spectrum. This situation leads to the fairness issue of spectrum resource sharing between the SUs. Both cooperative and fairness issues are important to CRAHN performance. In this paper, a cooperative and a non-cooperative multichannel (MC)-MAC protocol is proposed. In order to address the fairness issue, a fair multichannel (FMC)-MAC protocol for CRAHN is proposed, which orientates to the fairness in resource sharing. In this FMC-MAC, the SU keeps the current backoff (CB) counter when a PU appears to claim the intended channel. These proposed MAC protocols are simulated using NS2 and compared with other protocols. In addition, a mathematical model using Markov chain is constructed for FMC-MAC and the performance measures are derived. From results, the MC-MAC protocol has enhanced the network utilization and the cooperative scheme has significantly enhanced the packet delivery ratio and decreased the end-to-end delay of SUs in high traffic. The cooperative protocol enhances packet delivery ratio up to 15 % and decreases end-to-end delay down to 32 %, compared to the non-cooperative one. The FMC-MAC protocol with other two existing protocols. From the comparison results, a higher fairness has been shown by FMC-MAC CB while still maintaining a high throughput

A New Protocol for Cooperative Spectrum Sharing in Mobile Cognitive Radio Networks

To optimize the usage of limited spectrum resources, cognitive radio (CR) can be used as a viable solution. The main contribution of this article is to propose a new protocol to increase throughput of mobile cooperative CR networks (CRNs). The key challenge in a CRN is how the nodes cooperate to access the channel in order to maximize the CRN's throughput. To minimize unnecessary blocking of CR transmission, we propose a so-called new frequency-range MAC protocol (NFRMAC). The proposed method is in fact a novel channel assignment mechanism that exploits the dependence between signal's attenuation model, signal's frequency, communication range, and interference level. Compared .to the conventional methods, the proposed algorithm considers a more realistic model for the mobility pattern of CR nodes and also adaptively selects the maximal transmission range of each node over which reliable transmission is possible. Simulation results indicate that using NFRMAC leads to an increase of the total CRN's throughput by 6% and reduces the blocking rate by 10% compared to those of conventional methods

Cooperation and Underlay Mode Selection in Cognitive Radio Network

In this research, we proposes a new method for cooperation and underlay mode selection in cognitive radio networks. We characterize the maximum achievable throughput of our proposed method of hybrid spectrum sharing. Hybrid spectrum sharing is assumed where the Secondary User (SU) can access the Primary User (PU) channel in two modes, underlay mode or cooperative mode with admission control. In addition to access the channel in the overlay mode, secondary user is allowed to occupy the channel currently occupied by the primary user but with small transmission power. Adding the underlay access modes attains more opportunities to the secondary user to transmit data. It is proposed that the secondary user can only exploits the underlay access when the channel of the primary user direct link is good or predicted to be in non-outage state. Therefore, the secondary user could switch between underlay spectrum sharing and cooperation with the primary user. Hybrid access is regulated through monitoring the state of the primary link. By observing the simulation results, the proposed model attains noticeable improvement in the system performance in terms of maximum secondary user throughput than the conventional cooperation and non-cooperation schemes

An analysis on decentralized adaptive MAC protocols for Cognitive Radio networks

The scarcity of bandwidth in the radio spectrum has become more vital since the demand for more and more wireless applications has increased. Most of the spectrum bands have been allocated although many studies have shown that these bands are significantly underutilized most of the time. The problem of unavailability of spectrum and inefficiency in its utilization has been smartly addressed by the Cognitive Radio (CR) Technology which is an opportunistic network that senses the environment, observes the network changes, and then using knowledge gained from the prior interaction with the network, makes intelligent decisions by dynamically adapting their transmission characteristics. In this paper some of the decentralized adaptive MAC protocols for CR networks have been critically analyzed and a novel adaptive MAC protocol for CR networks, DNG-MAC which is decentralized and non-global in nature, has been proposed. The results show the DNG-MAC out performs other CR MAC protocols in terms of time and energy efficiency