PHY/MAC Signalling Protocols for Resilient Cognitive Radio Networks

Our society relies more and more on wireless communication technologies while most of the RF spectrum has already been allocated by the states. As a result, un-licensed bands are becoming crowded which makes it difficult to create a reliable network without using more spectrum than really necessary. Allowing radio nodes to seamlessly switch between different frequency bands without prior synchronisation would allow the creation of a truly resilient radio network capable of avoiding the frequency bands used by nodes that are not part of the network. In this paper, we propose using software-defined radios in order to sense the surrounding RF environment to find the most suitable bands for communication. We also propose a PHY-layer and a MAC-layer signalling protocols to provide a seamless way of discovering other nodes and selecting the parameters that will be used for communicating with them. Our first experimentation results are very promising towards defining a resilient cognitive radio network.