Design and Analysis of an OSA-BR MAC Protocol for Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Cognitive Radio (CR) is a new communication network paradigm introduced to solve the problems of spectrum scarcity and inefficient spectrum usage. Basically, it allows the Secondary Users (SUs) to utilize the Licensed Channels (LCs) of the Primary Users (PUs) in an opportunistic manner without causing any harmful interference to the PUs. However, there are many challenges associated with cognitive radio networks, such as the CR Medium Access Control (CR-MAC) protocols. An important issue for CR-MAC protocols is to identify whether the spectrum is licensed or unlicensed. In addition, the sudden appearance of the PU is the most important feature of the distributed CR-MAC protocols. In this paper, a multichannel CR-MAC protocol, which reacts efficiently to the appearance of the PUs, is developed. The proposed protocol is named Opportunistic Spectrum Access with backup channel and Buffered data with Resume (OSA-BR). The OSA-BR is an unaided rendezvous, asynchronous, and contention-based MAC protocol. The proposed protocol operates in heterogeneous environment, where the SUs utilize both LCs and unlicensed channel (ULs) and the activities of the Classical Users (CUs) are taken into consideration. In addition, the concept of the backup channel and the buffer with resume are introduced. The simulation results show that OSA-BR accomplishes 35% throughput gain over the SWITCH protocol and 55% over other CR-MAC protocols.