A cooperative CSMA/CA MAC for channel-hopping rendezvous based cognitive radio networks

Rendezvous problem is known as the fundamental issue in MAC design for cognitive radio networks (CRNs). With the concept of blind rendezvous, numerous channel-hopping sequence (CHS) based rendezvous schemes have been proposed to solve this problem. However, little attention is paid to the design of a CSMA/CA MAC based on these rendezvous schemes. In this paper, we propose a cooperative CSMA/CA MAC (named CoCH-CSMA/CA MAC) which tailors 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) to the slotted operation manner of existing CHS based rendezvous schemes. More importantly, the rendezvous de-synchronization problem is identified in MAC design based on these rendezvous schemes. To alleviate its impact on MAC performance, a cooperative control feedback scheme employing correlation-based signal detection is proposed to help secondary users avoid backoff misbehavior and improve networking performance (i.e., packet delivery delay and network throughput). Extensive simulations are conducted to prove the effectiveness of our MAC design.