Channel-hopping on multiple channels for full rendezvous diversity in cognitive radio networks

In cognitive radio networks, a pair of communicating nodes are required to rendezvous or meet on a common available channel prior to control information exchange. Maintaining a common control channel (CCC), has several drawbacks such as channel saturation, vulnerability to jamming attacks, and spatial variation in the CCC availability. Although channel-hopping (CH) approaches have been proposed to avoid these problems, most existing work on CH schemes assume that the nodes hop to one channel at a time. This paper proposes asynchronous CH schemes where the nodes listen to or transmit on an arbitrary number of channels at a time. The proposed schemes enable any pair of nodes to rendezvous on all common available channels in the shortest period of time. Simulations are performed to evaluate the expected time-to-rendezvous and robustness of our schemes to primary network activity.