A Single radio based channel datarate-aware parallel rendezvous MAC protocol for cognitive radio networks

Channel hopping based parallel rendezvous multichannel MAC protocols have several advantages since they do not need a control channel, require only one transceiver, and produce higher system capacity. However, channel hopping sequences in existing parallel rendezvous MAC protocols have been designed as irrelevant to channel data rates, leading to under-utilization of channel resources in multi-rate multi-channel networks. Considering that data rates among channels may be different, we propose a dynamic parallel rendezvous multichannel MAC protocol for synchronized cognitive radio networks in which the secondary users adjust their own distinct hopping sequences according to the datarates of the available channels, in a datarate-aware manner. A Markov chain based model has been developed to analyze the aggregate datarate of the proposed protocol. Numerical results show that the proposed method can improve the aggregate datarate significantly, compared with that of the existing parallel rendezvous MAC protocol.