Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks: A Local Control Approach

Abstract

Cognitive radio is an important technology which aims to improve the spectrum resource utilization and allows a cognitive radio transceiver to detect and sense spectrum holes without causing interference to the primary users (PUs). As a result of the development of cognitive radio technology, the concept of cognitive radio ad hoc networks (CRAHNs) has recently been proposed in the literature, which aims to apply the cognitive radio to traditional ad hoc networks. However, this new network paradigm creates more research challenges than those in classical cognitive radio networks (CRNs). These research challenges in CRAHNs are due to the variable radio environments caused by spectrum-dependent communication links, hop-by-hop transmission, and changing topology. This study will focus on important research topics in spectrum management in scalable CRAHNs driven by local control, such as spectrum sharing, allocation, and mobility. To conduct this study, a local control approach is proposed to enable system-level analysis and protocol-level design with distributed protocols for spectrum sharing. In the local control approach, we can evaluate the system dynamics caused by either protocol-specific parameters or application-specific parameters in CRAHNs, which is hard to explore using existing methods. Moreover, combining the previous evaluations and scaling law analysis based on local control concept, we can design new distributed protocols based on the features of the medium access control (MAC) layer and the physical layer. In this study, the proposed research themes and related research issues surrounding spectrum sharing are discussed. Moreover, justification of the research has been made by experimental and analytical results.