Toward Efficient Channel Hopping for Communication Rendezvous in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks

—We present ETCH, efficient channel hopping based MAC-layer protocols for communication rendezvous in Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) networks. Compared to the existing solutions, ETCH fully utilizes spectrum diversity in communication rendezvous by allowing all the rendezvous channels to be utilized at the same time. We propose two protocols, SYNC-ETCH, which is a synchronous protocol assuming DSA nodes can synchronize their channel hopping processes, and ASYNC-ETCH, which is an asynchronous protocol not relying on global clock synchronization. Our theoretical analysis and ns-2 based evaluation show that ETCH achieves better performances of time-to-rendezvous and throughput than the existing work.