Energy-Efficient Channel Hopping Protocol for Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

Channel Hopping (CH) is a representative technique to solve the rendezvous problem for Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs). Multiple radios technique were utilized in several latest researches on CH owing to the fact that it can significantly reduce the Time-To-Rendezvous (TTR) while the cost of the device is low. However, the radios of one unlicensed Secondary User (SU) may access same channel at the same time for most of the existing multi-radio CH protocols, which is a waste of energy. Moreover, the number of radios for the SUs is implicitly assumed same or must be more than one, which is unrealistic for heterogeneous CRNs. In this paper, an energy-efficient CH protocol, Hybrid Radio Rendezvous (HRR) protocol is proposed to address the above issues. Furthermore, theoretical analysis is presented to derive the upper bound on the Maximum TTR (MTTR) for the HRR protocol. In addition, the theoretical analysis is corroborated by extensive simulations while the simulation results show that the HRR protocol outperforms the state- of-the-art CH protocols in terms of the TTR and the energy efficiency.