Decentralized dynamic spectrum access in full-duplex cognitive radio networks

In the dynamic spectrum access (DSA) paradigm for cognitive radio networks (CRNs), one of the commonly used Medium Access Control (MAC) schemes is designed on basis of the popular carrier sensing multiple access with collision avoidance. However, this proposal suffers from two major problems that may significantly decrease the system performance: (1) collision among the secondary users (SUs) can hardly be detected, thus leading to the secondary transmission failures, and (2) SUs cannot abort transmission when collision occurs, making the long collision duration possible. In this paper, we propose a new cognitive MAC protocol for efficient DSA based on full-duplex CRNs (FD-CRNs), where SUs are able to perform simultaneous spectrum sensing and data transmission owing to full-duplex techniques. Specifically, SUs can detect the collision during transmission, so as to reduce the collision time and improve secondary network performance. Analytical results include the derivations of key design parameters such as the collision ratio with the PU, spectrum usage ratio, optimal contention window size, and the performance comparisons with the conventional DSA in half-duplex CRNs (HD-CRNs), which are further confirmed by simulation results.