A Distributed Medium Access Control Protocol for Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

We propose a distributed medium access control protocol for cognitive radio networks to opportunistically utilize multiple channels. Under the proposed protocol, cognitive radio nodes forecast and rank channel availability observing primary users’ activities on the channels for a period of time by time series analyzing using smoothing models for seasonal data by Winters’ method. The proposed approach protects primary users, mitigates channel access delay, and increases network performance. We analyze the optimal time to sense channels to avoid conflict with the primary users. We simulate and compare the proposed protocol with the existing protocol. The results show that the proposed approach utilizes channels more efficiently.