A concurrent transmission MAC protocol for enhancing throughout and avoiding spectrum sensing in cognitive radio

Abstract

For the cognitive radio (CR) network, a fundamental issue is how to identify the spectrum opportunities. First, each CR node determines whether there exists transmission opportunities on unlicensed bands. If not, this node will find other opportunity on licensed bands. Thus, increasing the opportunities of concurrent transmissions in unlicensed bands can reduce the overhead of wide-band sensing. In this paper, based on the carrier sensing multiple access protocol, we propose a novel concurrent transmissions MAC (CT-MAC) protocol to identify the possibility of establishing the second link in the presence of the first link in the unlicensed band. In addition to reducing the overhead of wide-band sensing, the proposed CT-MAC scheme can enhance overall throughput and is backward compatible with the IEEE 802.11 standard.