A periodic jump-based rendezvous algorithm in cognitive radio networks

An important issue in designing multichannel MAC protocols for Opportunistic Spectrum Access (OSA) is the synchronization between Secondary Users (SUs). Synchronization can be performed in two phases: the initial handshaking, and then the synchronous hopping across available channels. In this paper, we address the problem of initial handshaking through the approach called “blind rendezvous”. We first introduce a role-based solution by constructing two channel hopping sequences. The secondary transmitter and receiver jump across channels according to these two sequences. The proposed algorithm guarantees rendezvous in at most (C+1)2(C+1)2 time slots (where C is the number of channels) and two SUs have a chance to rendezvous in each successive period of C time slots. We show that this property of constructed sequences leads to a lower average time-to-rendezvous (TTR) for the proposed algorithm in comparison to other related works. We also devise a solution to ensure rendezvous in the presence of jitter. Next, we extend the proposed algorithm to the non-role-based scenario. Simulation results show that it has the best performance with respect to existing works in various traffic patterns of primary users. Besides, it is the most predictable solution due to its low variance of TTR.