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

On the Estimation of Channel State Transitions for Cognitive Radio Systems

Coexistence by means of shared access is a cognitive radio application. The secondary user models the slotted primary users channel access as a Markov process. The model parameters, i.e, the state transition probabilities (alpha,beta) help secondary user to determine the channel occupancy, thereby enables secondary user to rank the primary user channels. These parameters are unknown and need to be estimated by secondary users for each channel. To do so, the secondary users have to sense all the primary user channels in every time slot, which is unrealistic for a large and sparsely allocated primary user spectrum. With no other choice left, the secondary user has to sense a channel at random time intervals and estimate the parametric information for all the channels using the observed slots.Comment: 6 page

Improved Spectrum Mobility using Virtual Reservation in Collaborative Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio technology would enable a set of secondary users (SU) to opportunistically use the spectrum licensed to a primary user (PU). On the appearance of this PU on a specific frequency band, any SU occupying this band should free it for PUs. Typically, SUs may collaborate to reduce the impact of cognitive users on the primary network and to improve the performance of the SUs. In this paper, we propose and analyze the performance of virtual reservation in collaborative cognitive networks. Virtual reservation is a novel link maintenance strategy that aims to maximize the throughput of the cognitive network through full spectrum utilization. Our performance evaluation shows significant improvements not only in the SUs blocking and forced termination probabilities but also in the throughput of cognitive users.Comment: 7 pages, 10 figures, IEEE ISCC 201