A Double Stage Random Access Scheme for Decentralized Single Radio Cognitive Networks

This work proposes a new scheme to coordinate the medium access of single-radio unlicensed users in a decentralized cognitive radio network. The proposed solution is based on two different stages. Unlicensed users randomly define the medium access sequence during the first stage and part of the second one. Then the nodes simply transmit their packets according to the reserved sequence. The performance of the proposed scheme is theoretically characterized in terms of the throughput achieved by unlicensed users and validated through simulation. Since a random access mechanism is used in the both stages, we also compare the performance of our proposal with a pure Slotted Aloha access scheme and an improved version of it. By comparing their performance, we conclude that the proposed scheme exhibits significant gains in terms of the throughput achieved by unlicensed users, and it can be recommended as a viable solution for future decentralized single radio cognitive networks.