Initial link establishment in Cognitive Radio Networks without common control channel

In this paper, the problem of initial link establishment in multi-channel Cognitive Radio Networks (CRN) is investigated. Different from the traditional scenario, in which the transceiver pair can establish an initial link through exchanging the control messages on the Common Control Channel (CCC), a more realistic scenario in the absence of CCC is considered in our work. Without the help of CCC, an initial link establishment approach based on the technique of group hopping is proposed and analyzed. In the asymptotic scenario N → ∞ (N: the number of available channels), we firstly derive the analytical expression of the condition, under which the initial link can be successfully established with probability arbitrarily close to 1. Secondly, we present the upper bound of average trial times and derive another condition, under which the initial link can be established within the required trial times in an average sense. Finally, we validate the analysis through extensive simulations.