A MAC protocol with mobility support in cognitive radio ad hoc networks: Protocol design and analysis

Cognitive radio ad hoc networks (CRAHNs) have recently been proposed as a way to bring cognitive radio (CR) technology to traditional ad hoc networks. An important problem is to design a medium access control (MAC) protocol that addresses the decentralized control and local observation for spectrum management. In this paper, we propose a cognitive MAC protocol with mobility support (CM-MAC) based on carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) technique, where our protocol can respond to the vicinity state of CR nodes to primary exclusive regions. This paper analyzes the throughput performance for the proposed MAC protocol with the consideration of multiple PU activities and CR nodes. Our analytical results show that the proposed MAC protocol outperforms the throughput performance of the classical CSMA/CA MAC and statistical channel allocation (SCA) MAC protocols.