An Energy Efficient MAC Protocol for QoS Provisioning in Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks

The explosive growth in the use of real-time applications on mobile devices has resulted in new challenges to the design of medium access control (MAC) protocols for ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient cognitive radio (CR) MAC protocol for QoS provisioning called ECRQ-MAC, which integrate the spectrum sensing at physical (PHY) layer and the channel-timeslots allocation at MAC layer. We consider the problem of providing QoS guarantee to CR users as well as to maintain the most efficient use of scarce bandwidth resources. The ECRQ-MAC protocol exploits the advantage of both multiple channels and TDMA, and achieves aggressive power savings by allowing CR users that are not involved in communication to go into sleep mode. The proposed ECRQ-MAC protocol allows CR users to identify and use the unused frequency spectrum of licensed band in a way that constrains the level of interference to the primary users (PUs). Our scheme improves network throughput significantly, especially when the network is highly congested. The simulation results show that our proposed protocol successfully exploits multiple channels and significantly improves network performance by using the licensed spectrum opportunistically and protects QoS provisioning over cognitive radio ad hoc networks

A Sensing Error Aware MAC Protocol for Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radios (CR) are intelligent radio devices that can sense the radio environment and adapt to changes in the radio environment. Spectrum sensing and spectrum access are the two key CR functions. In this paper, we present a spectrum sensing error aware MAC protocol for a CR network collocated with multiple primary networks. We explicitly consider both types of sensing errors in the CR MAC design, since such errors are inevitable for practical spectrum sensors and more important, such errors could have significant impact on the performance of the CR MAC protocol. Two spectrum sensing polices are presented, with which secondary users collaboratively sense the licensed channels. The sensing policies are then incorporated into p-Persistent CSMA to coordinate opportunistic spectrum access for CR network users. We present an analysis of the interference and throughput performance of the proposed CR MAC, and find the analysis highly accurate in our simulation studies. The proposed sensing error aware CR MAC protocol outperforms two existing approaches with considerable margins in our simulations, which justify the importance of considering spectrum sensing errors in CR MAC design.Comment: 21 page, technical repor