Energy efficient cognitive radio MAC protocol for adhoc networks

Cognitive radio technology can improve spectrum efficiency by allowing secondary users to opportunistically access frequency bands. Although a number of approaches have been proposed for improving the performance of cognitive radio networks, little attention has been given to energy efficiency. In this paper we propose a novel energy efficient cognitive radio MAC protocol for cognitive radios. The protocol uses an adaptive aggregation technique, which aggregates higher layer packets to minimize the amount of overhead. We show through evaluation that the protocol saves 9% time and 11.544% energy as compared to DSA-MAC protocol, as benchmark. Finally, we show that our new proposed EECR-MAC saves energy in the network as compared to CREAM-MAC, OC-MAC and DSA-MAC protocols. Also, EECR-MAC achieves higher throughput as compared to 802.11b and DSA protocols while load increases as an additional benefit.