Sender-Jump Receiver-Wait: A Simple Blind Rendezvous Algorithm for Distributed Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio (CR) has emerged as an advanced and promising technology to exploit the wireless spectrum opportunistically. In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), any pairwise communicating nodes are required to rendezvous on a commonly available channel prior to exchange information. In the earlier research, the most popular method is selecting a Common Control Channel (CCC) in CRNs to establish the rendezvous. However, employing a CCC has many problems such as the control channel saturation, vulnerability to jamming attacks, and inapplicability to dynamic network scenarios. Therefore, the blind rendezvous, which requires neither CCC nor the information of the target user's available channels, has recently attracted a lot of research interests. As a contribution to this research area, in this paper we propose a Sender-Jump Receiver-Wait (SJ-RW) blind rendezvous algorithm, which has fully satisfied the following requirements: 1) guaranteeing rendezvous; 2) realizing full rendezvous diversity, i.e., any pair of users can rendezvous on all commonly available channels; 3) requiring no time-synchronization; 4) supporting both symmetric and asymmetric models; 5) supporting multi-user/multi-hop scenarios and 6) consuming short Time-to-Rendezvous (TTR). Theoretical analysis, computer simulations and experiment with testbed have validated the proposed SJ-RW algorithm.