Efficient idle channel discovery mechanism through cooperative parallel sensing in cognitive radio network

Abstract

Finding holes from the underutilized portion of spectrum at various times and locations is the most important function in cognitive radio networks (CRNs). This requires efficient sensing policy at the MAC layer that can discover more idle channels in less time. Whereas, the sensing policy depends on the channel sensing order that decides how a secondary user senses the primary user band in minimum period of time. Spectrum sensing policies for searching idle channels from the underutilized primary band can significantly affect the performance of secondary user in terms of throughput, reliability, and energy efficiency. In this paper, we have analyzed MAC protocol structure for ad hoc radio networks which used random channel sensing. This results in poor performance, either due to the channels being skipped or the time for sensing the band being significantly longer. We propose a parallel sensing scheme with sequential channel selection order as part of MAC protocol, which can discover all the free channels in the primary user band in less time. For the proposed scheme, we have performed analysis over the number of channels sensed and the number of idle channels discovered. Furthermore, energy efficiency and throughput of the system have also been evaluated. The results show considerable improvement for the proposed scheme when compared with the contemporary scheme.

Self-Organized Efficient Spectrum Management through Parallel Sensing in Cognitive Radio Network

“…Many efforts have been dedicated to optimize the spectrum sensing in CRN [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33]. Spectrum sensing schemes are mainly classified into two main categories: (a) narrow band and (b) wide band.…”

“…In the case of wide band, the whole spectrum is divided into multiple channels and then they are sensed using the narrow-band spectrum sensing schemes, either randomly, sequentially, or in parallel [32]. In [20], the authors have proposed cooperative parallel sensing in CRN to discover the vacant primary channels. The idea is to make SU groups according to their IDs.…”

“…The possibility to unify the parallel sensing approach with the self-organizing MAC scheme has been quite enticing and served to be the main motivation for this work. Therefore, the proposed PSO-MAC develops a unified frame structure that captures the benefits of the two approaches as presented in [18,20]. Further, PSO-MAC incorporates the optimization of number parallel sensing groups to maximize the discovered resources as well as the utilization of discovered resources while keeping the overhead minimum.…”

“…To create the pool of available resources, SUs perform cooperative sensing [19]. In another research, a parallel sensing scheme has been devised to maximize the channel time for data transmission [20]. Both schemes improve the performance in their respective domains.…”

“…In this work, parallel sensing along with self-organizing medium access control (PSO-MAC) has been proposed, which is an extension of work in [18,20]. PSO-MAC provides parallel channel sensing and self-organizing channel access mechanism through a single unified frame structure, which improves channel utilization as well as idle channel discovery process and hence increases the overall network throughput.…”