A Fair MAC protocol for Resource Sharing in Ad-Hoc Cognitive Networks

Cognitive Radio (CR) technology allows an opportunistic use of the licensed spectrum by the CR users, avoiding harmful interference to Primary Users (PUs). To perform their activity, secondary users (SUs) have particular features compared to the PUs; sensing is one of the principal. Specifically the CR users must detect the spectrum holes left by PUs by performing sensing. All the protocol stack need to be redesigned taking into account the specificity of the cognitive environment. In this paper a novel MAC protocol for cognitive radio wireless ad-hoc networks is presented and analysed. The introduced protocol is distributed, collision-free and guarantees a fair channel assignment, also taking into account the requests of Quality of Service (QoS) of the CR nodes. The performance of the protocol has been studied through statistical computations. In particular, a Markov chain has been introduced to study the global performance of the protocol. In addition a simulation tool has been developed to validate the mathematical model and to prove the fairness of the resource sharing mechanism. The results prove the protocol efficiency and the high fairness, measured with the help of the Jain's fairness index. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.