Distributed multichannel medium access control protocol without common control channel for single-hop cognitive radio networks

A novel distributed cognitive radio multichannel medium access protocol without common control channel was proposed. The protocol divided a transmission interval into two parts for exchanging control information and data, respectively. In addition to evaluating system saturation throughput of the proposed protocol, a three-dimensional multi channel Markov chain model to describe the sate of the cognitive users (CUs) in dynamic spectrum access was presented. The proposed analysis was applied to the packet transmission schemes employed by the basic, RTS/CTS access mechanism adopted in the normal IEEE 802.11. Analyzing the advantage of the two methods, a hybrid access mechanism was proposed to improve the system throughput. The simulation results show that the experiment results are close to the value computed by the model (less than 5%), and the proposed protocol significantly improves the performance of the system throughput by borrowing the licensed spectrum. By analyzing the dependence of throughput on system parameters, hybrid mechanism dynamically selecting access mechanism can maintain high throughput.