Cognitive medium access control protocols for secondary users sharing a common channel with time division multiple access primary users

The unused time slots in a primary time division multiple access (TDMA) network are regarded as the potential channel access opportunities for secondary users (SUs) in cognitive radio (CR). In this paper, we investigate the medium access control protocols that enable SUs to access a common TDMA channel with primary users (PUs). The primary traffic is assumed to follow a Bernoulli random process. A two-state Markov chain is used to model the secondary traffic, and two different scenarios are considered. The first scenario assumes that the secondary packet arrivals are independent and follow a Bernoulli random process and a cognitive carrier sensing multiple access (Cog-CSMA) protocol is proposed. A Rayleigh fading channel is considered in evaluating Cog-CSMA, and its throughput expression is derived in this paper. The second scenario assumes that the packet arrivals follow a correlated packet arrival process and a cognitive packet reservation multiple access (Cog-PRMA) protocol is proposed. A Markov chain is used to model the different system states in Cog-PRMA and derive the throughput. Numerical results show that the Cog-CSMA and Cog-PRMA protocols achieve the objective of supporting secondary transmissions in a TDMA network without interfering the PUs’ transmissions and improve the network bandwidth utilization. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.