Trading Delay for Fairness in MAC Design for Cognitive Personal Area Networks

In this paper we investigate the performance of a cognitive personal area network (CPAN) with round robin service where each node is allowed to transmit a batch of up to ? packets in one transmission cycle. In order to contribute to cooperative sensing (and thus support the operation of the CPAN), each node need to perform sensing duty, the duration of which is proportional to the number of packets sent in a batch, as regulated by a variable penalty coefficient. Spectrum sensing can be preempted by the reception activity of the node and resumed in the following superframe. We model this system and show the relationship between delay, fairness and stability with respect to scheduling parameter ?, penalty coefficient and traffic load.