OMC-MAC: An Opportunistic Multichannel MAC for Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio (CR) is a recent innovation based on an intelligent radio design paradigm that can vastly improve utilization of valuable radio spectrum. However, successful deployment of CR technology in next generation wireless networks requires many new research challenges to be addressed, especially in the medium access control (MAC) layer. In this paper, we propose a novel MAC design, referred as Opportunistic Multichannel Cognitive MAC (OMC-MAC), for distributed CR networks to address some of these most important design issues. We also develop an analytical framework to study the performance of our proposed protocol in terms of important performance measures. The results achieved from the analytical model and validated by simulation, show that our simple yet efficient design achieves excellent spectrum utilization, shows superb robustness in presence of sensing error and handles multichannel hidden terminal problem very effectively.