Cooperative Medium Access Control Based on Spectrum Leasing

Based on cooperative spectrum leasing, a distributed “win-win” (WW) cooperative framework is designed to encourage the licensed source node (SN) to lease some part of its spectral resources to the unlicensed relay node (RN) for the sake of simultaneously improving the SN's achievable rate and for reducing the energy consumption (EC). The potential candidate RNs carry out autonomous decisions concerning whether to contend for a cooperative transmission opportunity, which could dissipate some of their battery power, while conveying their traffic in light of their individual service requirements. Furthermore, a WW cooperative medium-access-control (MAC) protocol is designed to implement the proposed distributed WW cooperative framework. Simulation results demonstrate that our WW cooperative MAC protocol is capable of providing both substantial rate improvements and considerable energy savings for the cooperative spectrum leasing system.