Rendezvous in Heterogeneous Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

Rendezvous is a fundamental and important process in operating a distributed system, which can be applied in many distributed applications running on the system. In this chapter, we introduce the rendezvous process in a special type of cognitive radio network: Heterogeneous Cognitive Radio Network (HCRN) where different users have different capabilities to sense the licensed spectrum. Many elegant rendezvous algorithms have been proposed by constructing sequences based on the channels’ labels [1, 3, 7, 8, 10] or their identifiers (IDs) [2, 4, 5], and rendezvous can be guaranteed in a short time based on the special hopping sequences constructed. However, they all assume the users have the capability to sense and access all the licensed channels, which is unrealistic when the number of channels (N) is very large and some wireless devices may only operate on a small fraction of the channels. Therefore, HCRN is proposed, in which the users may have different spectrum-sensing capabilities. We introduce the system model and formulate the problem in Sect. 17.1. Rendezvous algorithms for the fully available spectrum are presented in Sect. 17.2, and rendezvous algorithms for the partially available spectrum are introduced in Sect. 17.3. Finally, we summarize the chapter in Sect. 17.4.