Double Hopping: A new approach for Dynamic Frequency Hopping in Cognitive Radio networks

One of the major challenges in designing cellular cognitive radio (CR) networks is the avoidance of secondary user (SU) interference to so called primary users (PUs) operating in the licensed bands. Usually, SU operation has to be interrupted periodically in order to detect PU activity and avoid the respective frequencies. Recently, dynamic frequency hopping (DFH) mechanisms have been suggested to enable reliable PU detection and continuous SU operation at the same time. Applying DFH in a multi-cell environment adds the challenge of mitigating co-channel interference (CCI). In this paper, we introduce a new DFH approach for cellular CR networks to allow reliable PU detection and continuous SU operation while avoiding CCI: double hopping (DH). We present a distributed frequency assignment heuristic for DH and compare it to the optimal assignment. We show that the performance of the sub-optimal distributed assignment is only slightly worse than the optimal performance, and, thus, outperforms existing distributed approaches by far.