A Self-Scheduling Multi-Channel Cognitive Radio MAC Protocol Based on Cooperative Communications

Abstract

As the demand for spectrum for future wireless communication services increases, cognitive radio technology has been developed for dynamic and opportunistic spectrum access, which enables the secondary users to use the underutilized licensed spectrum of the primary users. In particular, the recent studies on the MAC protocol for dynamic and opportunistic access have focused on sensing and using the vacant spectrum efficiently. Under the ad-hoc network environment, how the secondary users use the unused channels by the primary users affects the efficient utilization of channels and a cognitive radio system is required to follow the rapid and frequent changes in channel status. In this paper, we propose a self-scheduling multi-channel cognitive MAC (SMC-MAC) protocol, which allows multiple secondary users to transmit data though the sensed idle channels by two cooperative channel sensing algorithms, i.e., fixed channel sensing (FCS) and adaptive channel sensing (ACS), and by slotted contention mechanism to exchange channel request information for self-scheduling. The performance of the proposed SMC-MAC protocol is investigated via analysis and simulations. According to the results, the proposed SMC-MAC protocol is effective in allowing multiple secondary users to transmit data frames effectively on multi-channels and adaptively in response to the primary users' traffic dynamics.