Harnessing frequency domain for cooperative sensing and multi-channel contention in CRAHNs

It is known that current fixed spectrum assignment policy has made the spectrum resource significantly underutilized. As a promising solution, cognitive radio emerges and shows its advantages. It allows the unlicensed users to opportunistically access the spectrum not used by the licensed users. To ensure that the unlicensed users can identify the vacate spectrum fast and accurately without interfering the licensed users, cooperative sensing is explored to improve the sensing performance by leveraging spatial diversity. However, cooperation gain can be compromised dramatically with cooperation overhead. Furthermore, when sensing decisions are made, contention on spectrum access also contributes a lot to the control overhead, especially in the distributed networks. Motivated by this, we propose a novel MAC design, termed Frequency domain Cooperative sensing and Multi-channel contention (FCM) for Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks (CRAHNs). FCM is proposed for OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) modulation based communication systems, which moves cooperative sensing and multi-channel contention from time domain into frequency domain. Therefore, control overhead caused by cooperation and contention can be significantly reduced. Meanwhile, the sensing and access performance can be both guaranteed. Extensive simulation results show that FCM can effectively reduce the control overhead, and improve the average throughput by 220% over Traditional Cooperative MAC for CRAHNs.