A Full Duplex Multi-channel MAC Protocol for Multi-hop Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

Cognitive radio (CR) offers a new mechanism for flexible usage of radio spectrum. This paper presents a full-duplex multi-channel MAC protocol designed for CR enabled multi-hop networks. Each node is equipped with at least two transceivers, one for transmitting and another for receiving. A node selects an unused frequency band as its home channel (HCh) and tunes its receiver to its HCh. When a node j has a packet to transmit to its neighbor i, node j tunes its transmitter to the HCh of node i and sends the packet(s) to node i using CSMA/CA scheme of IEEE 802.11 DCF mode. The protocol has two flavors: (a) With a common control channel which requires 3 transceivers and (b) without the control channel. Simulation studies show that the proposed protocol outperforms IEEE 802.11 DCF mode by a factor of 20