Control Channel Establishment in Cognitive Radio Networks using Channel Hopping

In decentralized cognitive radio (CR) networks, enabling the radios to establish a control channel (i.e., "rendezvous" to establish a link) is a challenging problem. The use of a dedicated common control channel simplifies the rendezvous process but may not be feasible in many opportunistic spectrum sharing scenarios due to the dynamically changing availability of all the channels, including the control channel. To address this problem, researchers have proposed the use of channel hopping protocols for enabling rendezvous in CR networks. Most, if not all, of the existing channel hopping schemes only provide ad hoc approaches for generating channel hopping sequences and evaluating their properties. In this paper, we present a systematic approach, based on quorum systems, for designing and analyzing channel hopping protocols for the purpose of control channel establishment. The proposed approach, called Quorum-based Channel Hopping (QCH) system, can be used for implementing rendezvous protocols in CR networks that are robust against link breakage caused by the appearance of incumbent user signals. We describe two synchronous QCH systems under the assumption of global clock synchronization, and two asynchronous channel hopping systems that do not require global clock synchronization. Our analytical and simulation results show that the proposed channel hopping schemes outperform existing schemes under various network conditions.