Opportunistic Channel-Hopping Based Effective Rendezvous Establishment in Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), second users (SUs) exploit spectrum holes by accessing multiple channels opportunistically. In such a dynamic-spectrum-access network, the SUs equipped with cognitive radios have to establish rendezvous on a common channel before they are able to communicate with each other. Due to the intermittent appearance of primary users’ signals, SUs have to access the channels opportunistically, which makes the rendezvous problem challenging. This paper focuses on blind rendezvous where neither any central controller nor common control channel is available. Under an opportunistic framework, we propose the concept of channel availability to measure the dynamic feature of channels, and we study the pairwise effective rendezvous problem systematically, for which a simple yet efficient and flexible opportunistic method is proposed. We further extend our method to the many-to-one rendezvous problem for fairness consideration. The performances of our solutions are evaluated via both theoretical analysis and extensive simulations.