Adaptive variable-size virtual clustering for control channel assignment in dynamic access networks: Design and simulations

Abstract

Cognitive Radio (CR) technology was introduced to effectively exploit the under-utilization portions of the licensed spectrum. A primary challenge in enabling CR networking is how to coordinate the CR communications, in which CR users need to exchange their control information before data exchange can take place. Providing a reliable coordination mechanism in CR networks (CRNs) is not an easy task because of the dynamic nature of primary radio (PR) activities and the heterogeneity of both spectrum availability and CR users’ distribution. In this paper, we propose a dynamic-size clustering with CSMA/CA-based algorithm to overcome the challenge of achieving reliable coordination in CR networks (CRNs). CR users in our scheme are organized into dynamic size clusters and cooperate in selecting common control channels (CCCs) and use them for cluster coordination. The proposed scheme called Dynamic-hop virtual clustering distributed coordination (DH-VCDC). This scheme provides a dynamic-hop virtual clustering based on the traffic condition of both PR and CR users while achieving a minimum number of common available data channels per cluster, in which a better trade-off between the number of common idle channels per cluster and the cluster size is achieved. DH-VCDC scheme exploits the advantages of using Multi-packet Multi-channel Discontinuous Orthogonal Division Multiplexing (DOFDM) to reduce neighbor discovery time, allow CR users to have several cluster memberships, select multiple CCCs and simplify the inter-cluster coordination. CR users in our scheme are grouped to form virtual clusters each contains at least 2 CCCs (primary and backup CCCs). Three modes of DH-VCDC are presented: one-, two- and three-hop modes. Each CR must continuously monitor both PR and CR traffic loads and accordingly chooses the appropriate DH-VCDC mode. The performance of DH-VCDC is compared with reference schemes, in which significant performance improvement is reported.