A Contention-Free Reporting Scheme Based MAC Protocol for Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) is widely investigated in cognitive radio networks (CRNs) to improve the spectrum sensing performance. To realize CSS, how to collect sensing data from the secondary users (SUs) is one of the major problems. To solve the problem, in this paper, we propose a contention-free reporting scheme-based MAC protocol for CSS in the CRNs. With the proposed the MAC protocol, the SUs can report the sensing data to the fusion center without any reporting collisions, therefore increasing the reporting channel efficiency. Moreover, two admission control schemes are designed for throughput optimization and energy efficiency optimization, which further improve the performance of the proposed MAC protocol. Simulation results show that the proposed MAC protocol outperforms existing protocols.