A Sensing Error Aware MAC Protocol for Cognitive Radio Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel MAC protocol for cognitive radio networks that explicitly accounts for sensing errors, improving spectrum access efficiency and reducing interference compared to existing methods.

Contribution

It proposes a sensing error aware MAC protocol with collaborative sensing policies integrated into p-Persistent CSMA, addressing practical sensing errors in CR networks.

Findings

The protocol significantly reduces interference in simulations.

It achieves higher throughput than existing approaches.

Analysis closely matches simulation results.

Abstract

Cognitive radios (CR) are intelligent radio devices that can sense the radio environment and adapt to changes in the radio environment. Spectrum sensing and spectrum access are the two key CR functions. In this paper, we present a spectrum sensing error aware MAC protocol for a CR network collocated with multiple primary networks. We explicitly consider both types of sensing errors in the CR MAC design, since such errors are inevitable for practical spectrum sensors and more important, such errors could have significant impact on the performance of the CR MAC protocol. Two spectrum sensing polices are presented, with which secondary users collaboratively sense the licensed channels. The sensing policies are then incorporated into p-Persistent CSMA to coordinate opportunistic spectrum access for CR network users. We present an analysis of the interference and throughput performance of the proposed CR MAC, and find the analysis highly accurate in our simulation studies. The proposed sensing error aware CR MAC protocol outperforms two existing approaches with considerable margins in our simulations, which justify the importance of considering spectrum sensing errors in CR MAC design.