A Coordinated Distributed Scheme for Cognitive Radio Based IEEE 802.22 Wireless Mesh Networks

The IEEE 802.22 standard based on cognitive radio is envisioned as one of the solutions that can harness the unused or under-utilized spectrum that was primarily been allocated for licensed TV services. This allows the cognitive radio enabled devices to opportunistically use the spectrum without spatial and temporal interference with the licensed devices. Alongside, the success of wireless mesh networks is enabling the possibility of creating wide-area wireless back-haul networks that will have increased network resource utilization and better performance. In this paper, we study the limitations of the current IEEE 802.22 MAC in mesh establishment and propose a coordinated distributed scheme for IEEE 802.22 enabled devices to establish a mesh network with reduced latency and control signaling. The coordination is initiated by the base station and is followed by the gradual joining of the IEEE 802.22 consumer premise equipments to the mesh network in a repeated, distributed manner. Through extensive simulation experiments, we demonstrate how the proposed mesh creation algorithm helps minimize mesh initialization latency, reduce control signaling, reduce start-up delay, reduce collisions during network initialization, and most importantly, increase spectrum utilization among IEEE 802.22 devices.