Contention-Aware Spectrum Sensing and Access Algorithm of Cognitive Network

The technology of sensing and access the potential available spectrum is always a hot topic for cognitive radio networks. Compare to the existing works, this paper proposes a new centralized sensing and access protocol which is based on the premise of contention-aware network flow. The target of this protocol is to maximize the expected throughput of the whole cognitive network. We have proven that finding the optimal sensing and access results under a fixed contention topology is NP problem. An approximated algorithm is proposed which is consisted by minimum clique cover and maximum matching algorithm. By detailed simulation, the performance of the approximated algorithm have at least 30% improvement comparing to the optimal sensing and access scheme which do not adopt the clique cover and maximum matching scheme.