A Multihop Rendezvous Protocol for Cognitive Radio-based Emergency Response Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces M-DMCA, a multihop rendezvous protocol for cognitive radio networks that reduces discovery delay in emergency scenarios by extending modular clock algorithms with dual-channel selection and handshake mechanisms.

Contribution

The paper proposes M-DMCA, a novel multihop rendezvous protocol that enhances coordination efficiency and reduces delay in cognitive radio networks for emergency response.

Findings

M-DMCA achieves up to 24% reduction in rendezvous time.

It performs well under high primary user activity and dense network conditions.

Simulation results validate its effectiveness for emergency scenarios.

Abstract

This paper addresses the challenge of efficient rendezvous in multihop cognitive radio networks, where existing channel-hopping algorithms designed for single-hop scenarios incur increased delay and coordination inefficiencies in multinode topologies. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Multihop Dual Modular Clock Algorithm (M-DMCA), which systematically extends modular clock-based rendezvous to multihop environments while preserving efficient channel coordination. The proposed scheme enables dual-channel selection per timeslot and incorporates a lightweight three-way handshake mechanism to improve coordination among intermediate nodes. Simulation results under worst-case conditions, including high primary user activity, asymmetric channel availability, and dense network settings, demonstrate that M-DMCA significantly reduces rendezvous time compared to existing approaches, achieving up to 24% improvement. These results demonstrate the suitability of M-DMCA for timely node discovery in dynamic emergency response scenarios.