We propose a novel dynamic common control channel-based medium access control (DCCC-MAC) protocol for cellular (centralized) cognitive radio networks. Specifically, unlike the traditional dedicated control channel-based MAC protocols, the proposed MAC protocol eliminates the requirement of a dedicated channel for control information exchange. During a given transmission frame, the common control channel (CCC) is selected by a cooperating set of secondary users (SUs) by using support vector machine (SVM)-based learning technique. In the DCCC-MAC protocol, the frame duration is divided into four main phases as follows: spectrum sensing phase, CCC selection phase, data transmission phase, and beaconing phase. The secondary users (SUs) who participate in the common control channel selection process are allocated channels for data transmission during a frame interval using a scheduling process, while the other SUs have to contend for accessing the channels. We present an analytical approach to calculate the minimum required number of mini-slots in the transmission frame for a given number of SUs in the CCC selection process. The saturation throughput of the proposed MAC protocol is analyzed in closed-form. To this end, the numerical and simulation results are presented to quantify the performance of the proposed DCCC-MAC protocol. We also compare the performance of the the DCCC-MAC protocol with that of two other state-of-theart cognitive radio MAC protocols which use common control channels.

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