Opportunistic medium access control for maximizing packet delivery rate in dynamic access networks

摘要

One of the key challenges to enabling efficient cognitive radio (CR) communications is how to perform opportunistic medium access control (MAC) that maximizes spectrum efficiency. Several CRN MAC protocols have been designed assuming relatively static primary radio (PR) channels with average idle durations largely exceed CR transmission times. For such CR environment, typical multichannel MAC protocols, which select the best quality channel, perform reasonably well. However, when such mechanism is employed in a CRN that coexists with highly dynamic licensed PR networks (PRNs), where PR channel idle durations are comparable to CR transmission times, the forced-termination rate for CR transmission can significantly increase, leading to a reduction in network throughput. To reduce the forced-termination rate, many MAC protocols have been proposed to account for the dynamic time-varying nature of PR channels by requiring communicating CR users to consistently perform channel switching according to PR activities. However, such channel-switching strategy introduces significant overhead and latency, which negatively affect network throughput. Hence, in this paper, we propose a probabilistic channel quality- and availability-aware CRN MAC. Our protocol uses i novel charmei assignment mechanism that attempts at maximizing the packet success probability of each transmission and hence avoids the significant overhead and latency of channel switching. Simulation results show that by being quality- and availabiiity-aware, our protocol provides better spectrum utilization by decreasing the forced-termination rate and improving network throughput.