A multichannel MAC protocol for IoT-enabled Cognitive radio ad hoc networks

Abstract

Cognitive radios have the ability to dynamically sense and access the wireless spectrum, and this ability is a key factor in successfully building Internet-of-Things (IoT)-enabled mobile ad hoc networks. This paper proposes a contention-free token-based multichannel MAC protocol for IoT-enabled Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks (CRAHNs). In this, secondary users of CRAHNs detect activity on the wireless spectrum and then access idle channels licensed by primary users. CRAHNs are divided into clusters, and the channel to use for transmission is determined dynamically from the probability of finding idle primary-user channels. The token-based MAC window size is adaptive, with adjustment according to actual traffic, which reduces both end-to-end MAC contention delay and energy consumption. High throughput and spatial reuse of channels can also be achieved using a dynamic control channel and dynamic schemes for contention windows. We performed extensive simulations to verify that the proposed method can achieve better performance in mobile CRAHNs than other MAC schemes can.