Deterministic approach to rendezvous channel setup in cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio (CR) technology is envisioned to solve the scarcity and inefficient use of wireless spectrum by dynamically and opportunistically accessing the available spectrum without causing a significant interference to the primary users (PU). In this paper, we propose a solution to the problem on how cognitive radios can initially find each other under the dynamically changing available spectrum. The easiest and common practice to tackle this problem is to dedicate a control channel on which the nodes can rendezvous with each other. However, a dedicated common control channel has severe drawbacks and is not good choice for CR networks. In this paper, we propose Deterministic Approach to Rendezvous Channel Setup (DARC) scheme in which one of the free channels is chosen as a rendezvous channel by a central entity. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme has significantly lower time to rendezvous and gives better protection to the PU than previously proposed schemes.