A new communication framework for wide-band cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio is a promising technology to solve the spectrum scarcity problem. In a cognitive radio network, a secondary user (SU) first senses a specific range of the spectrum to get its available channels and two SUs need to rendezvous on a common available channel to establish a physical link for communications. The spectrum band allocated for existing wireless services is very wide. However, when a SU works in wideband spectrum, the increasing delay and energy consumption in spectrum sensing and the time for two SUs to rendezvous will be a serious problem. All the existing rendezvous papers only focus on designing efficient algorithms for guaranteed rendezvous without considering practical communication issues caused by the wide-band spectrum. In this paper, we propose a novel communication framework for wide-band cognitive radio networks without a common control channel. Our proposed framework can efficiently solve the problems coming from the wide-band spectrum and newly joined SUs. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme can achieve fast rendezvous and a high network throughput. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work with an effective solution to improve the communications in a wide-band cognitive radio network.