A Dynamic Coordinator Election Algorithm in Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

Cognitive radio network (CRN) is the most emerging technology in wireless communication paradigm. The various components of CRNs include secondary user or cognitive user (CU), primary user or licensed user (LU), and spectrum holes. The CU is an unlicensed user which does not have license to access the spectrum. The license of the spectrum is hold by the LU. The CU nodes exploit the spectrum in an opportunistic manner in the radio environment of LU. The CU node vacates the band if LU appears and starts searching for other available unutilized band. Due to this, the researchers has experienced CRN is a highly dynamic environment. Therefore, one of generic problem coined in CRN is the coordination among the CUs for their resources. It can be viewed as, one, coordination among the CU nodes activities and, other, the channel assignment. To do this, a node may be designated as a special node called coordinator or leader that figure out which bit of the range is accessible, select the best accessible channel, facilitate access to this channel with other node, and clear the channel when another node is identified. Thus, the present contribution proposes a diffusion based coordinator election algorithm, a process to identify a coordinator in CRN. The works also illustrates flow of the algorithm using suitable examples.