Blind Cognitive MAC Protocols

TL;DR

This paper introduces blind cognitive MAC protocols that enable secondary users to efficiently communicate over licensed channels without prior traffic statistics, learning primary traffic online to maximize throughput.

Contribution

It proposes novel blind MAC protocols for secondary users that learn primary traffic patterns online without prior statistical knowledge.

Findings

Protocols asymptotically achieve throughput comparable to known traffic statistics

Effective in both sensing scenarios with different primary channel sensing capabilities

Demonstrated through simulation results

Abstract

We consider the design of cognitive Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols enabling an unlicensed (secondary) transmitter-receiver pair to communicate over the idle periods of a set of licensed channels, i.e., the primary network. The objective is to maximize data throughput while maintaining the synchronization between secondary users and avoiding interference with licensed (primary) users. No statistical information about the primary traffic is assumed to be available a-priori to the secondary user. We investigate two distinct sensing scenarios. In the first, the secondary transmitter is capable of sensing all the primary channels, whereas it senses one channel only in the second scenario. In both cases, we propose MAC protocols that efficiently learn the statistics of the primary traffic online. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed blind protocols asymptotically achieve the throughput obtained when prior knowledge of primary traffic statistics is available.