A MAC Protocol for Cognitive Radio Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Cognitive Radio (CR,) technology allows an opportunistic use of the licensed spectrum by the CR users, avoiding harmful interference to primary users (PUs). The CR users must detect the spectrum holes left by PUs by performing sensing. CR Networks require MAC protocols with particular features compared to the classical MAC. We propose a MAC protocol for cognitive radio wireless ad-hoc networks, which has the advantages to be distributed, collision-free and of guaranteeing a fair channel assignment, also taking into account the requests of quality of service (QoS) of CR nodes. We proved, through statistical computations, that the protocol guarantees very high efficiency and channel utilization, assuring good global performance.