Cooperative Multichannel MAC Protocol for Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc

In this paper, we propose and investigate an efficient multichannel Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks (CRAHNs). The proposed protocol supports Secondary Users' (SUs) dynamic utilization of the licensed channel of Primary Users (PUs) to enable the SUs' performance of a multichannel data transmission simultaneously and without interfering with each other. The proposed protocol can be cooperative or non-cooperative. The cooperative protocol scheme enables a SU to sense PU's presence independently in a multichannel architecture and then broadcasts the report to its neighbors in a proactive fashion. The performance of the cooperative and non-cooperative protocol schemes is simulated and compared. The performance demonstration focuses not only on the SU performance but also on the PU's performance with an Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol enhances the network utilizations in general and that the cooperative scheme significantly enhances the Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and decreases the end-to-end delay of SUs with high traffic PU connections.