Efficient Discovery and Recovery of Common Control Channel in Cognitive Radio Wireless Ad-hoc Networks

The most important aspect of cognitive radio (CR) networks is to search, scan, and access the control channel to advertise the free channel list (FCL) amongst the participating CR nodes. Subsequent communication could not take place until there is an access to a well-known and agreed upon control channel to dialogue the initial configuration. In this paper, a novel protocol for searching, scanning, and accessing the control channel is proposed. The protocol consists of two levels of selection: rapid channel accessing and reliable channel accessing. In rapid channel accessing, nodes quickly and efficiently converge to a newly found control channel. In reliable channel accessing, switching to the backup control channel is performed when necessary. Furthermore, our reliable channel accessing allows CR nodes to access more than one control channel simultaneously. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach through analytical modelling. The performance results show that our protocol can achieve efficient channel access time and fairness.