A Distributed MAC Protocol Using Virtual Control Channels for CRSNs

A cognitive radio sensor network (CRSN) is a promising fusion network that combines conventional wireless sensor network (WSN) with cognitive radio (CR) functionalities. With abilities to sense for available channels and to adapt to the radio environment, a CRSN is able to be more opportunistic in accessing spectrums than a WSN, but it also has problems due to hardware constraints and energy limitations. In many studies on distributed CR MAC protocols, establishing dedicated control channels (DCCs) has been considered as an important problem because it is essentially used for coordination and negotiation of spectrum assignments. However, directly applying DCCs into CRSNs is impractical, due to its high-cost complexity in hardware and deployment. To solve it, in this paper we propose a distributed MAC protocol using virtual control channels for CRSNs, in which CR sensor nodes called secondary users are grouped into clusters, and commonly shared available channels are utilized as virtual DCCs. In addition, a channel selection scheme is developed, based on an approximated partially observable Markov decision process. Our numerical simulation results indicate that the proposed MAC protocol can not only improve the throughput rate but also reduce the energy consumption under no DCCs.