Dynamic Spectrum Sensing and Channel Access Mechanism in Frequency Hopping Based Cognitive Radio Ad-hoc Networks

Frequency resource value is growing more and more with the development of the wireless communication. With the advent of the current information society comes a serious shortage of frequency resource, as the amount of supply is far from meeting its demands. Thus, cognitive radio (CR) technique is receiving more attention as a way to make use of the temporarily unoccupied frequency resource. In this paper we propose a novel out-of-band spectrum sensing and dynamic channel access scheme for frequency hopping-based cognitive radio ad-hoc networks. At the beginning of each current channel hopping time, member nodes perform spectrum sensing for the next hopping channel. Based on the proposed collision free primary detection notification, member nodes can determine whether they should execute a hopping time extension procedure of the current channel or not. When the primary detected hopping channel is re-idled, the hopping pattern recovery procedure is performed. In this paper we evaluated the performance of the proposed dynamic sensing and hopping channel extension mechanism for the various wireless network conditions. As a result, we show that the proposed method can increase channel utilization and provide reliable channel management operation.