Distributed Coordinated Spectrum Sharing MAC Protocol for Cognitive Radio

Recently, the CR (cognitive radio) technology is gathering more and more attention because it has the capacity to deal with the scarce of the precious spectrum resource. Within the domain of CR technology, channel management of CR is of utmost importance due to its key role in the performance enhancement of the transmission and the minimum interference to the primary users as well. An 802.11 WLAN based ad-hoc protocol using the cognitive radio has been proposed in this paper. It provides the detection and protection for incumbent systems around the communication pair by separating the spectrum into the data channels and common control channel. By adding the available channel list into the RTS and CTS, the communication pair can know which data sub channels are available (i.e., no incumbent signal). We proposed an ENNI (exchanging of neighbor nodes information) mechanism to deal with the hidden incumbent device problem. The simulation results show that by using our protocol the hidden incumbent device problem (HIDP) can be solved successfully.