Energy and spectral efficient SMC-MAC protocol in distributed cognitive radio networks

Communication industry demands the frameworks, which allow significant improvement in energy efficiency with spectral efficiency, however, these two do not always coincide and may even conflict sometimes in cognitive radio networks. In addition to this, the distributed network structures are preferred over centralised structures due to ease of deployment as well as less information exchange between the cognitive users which reduce the network-overhead. Therefore, in this study, the authors have proposed a framework to enhance the spectral as well as energy efficiency by exploiting the novel frame structure in the distributed cognitive radio networks. A self-scheduled multichannel-medium access control (SMC-MAC) protocol has been proposed in which the contention and sharing intervals are exploited for the efficient spectrum and energy utilisation. Moreover, the closed-form expressions of the spectral efficiency, power consumption and energy efficiency for the proposed SMC-MAC protocols are derived. Furthermore, the relation between energy and spectral efficiency for the proposed framework is also derived. The numerically simulated results are presented to validate the proposed work and Monte-Carlo simulations are performed for the random events in order to support the numerically simulated results.