Agnostic broadcast rendezvous for cognitive radio networks using channel hopping

Abstract

Cognitive radios (CRs) are a promising solution for the spectrum scarcity problem. These radios access the spectrum in an opportunistic manner in order to take advantage of frequency bands, i.e. channels, left unused by primary users while not interfering with them. This opportunistic access model requires CRs to switch among channels searching for new opportunities and making contact with their neighbors to exchange the information needed for spectrum management. This search process, known as rendezvous (RV), is termed blind RV when it does not use a common control channel (CCC) or a centralized solution. Several algorithms have been proposed to deal with the blind RV problem. However, most of them do not deal with broadcast transmissions, that is, when a CR wants to exchange information with all its neighboring nodes. This paper proposes a broadcast mechanism that operates on top of different one-to-one RV algorithms but being agnostic to the one in use, i.e., any such mechanism can be combined with it. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism achieves a favorable performance while inheriting the good properties of the underlying one-to-one RV algorithm.