Enhance Throughput in Multi-Channel MAC Protocol for Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

Modern wireless technologies have the problem of improving the throughput and security of Multi-channel Medium Access Control (MMAC) protocols. We design a protocol called Full Duplex Multi-channel MAC(FD-MMAC) that exploits recent advances in full duplex (FD) communications to coordinate channel access in a distributed manner. Compared with prior MMAC designs, this protocol eliminates the use of dedicated in-band or out-of-band control channels for resolving contention, discovering the resident channel of destinations, and performing load balancing. We employ the randomized dynamic channel selection for load balancing among channels and the standard backoff mechanism for contention resolution on each available channel. FD-MMAC enables the operation of multi-channel exposed terminals. The elimination of the control channel improves spectral efficiency and mitigates denial-of-service attacks. FD-MMAC achieves significantly higher throughput. We theoretically analyze the throughput performance of FD-MMAC and verify our analysis via simulations.