Throughput Analysis of a Hybrid MAC Protocol for WiFi-Based Heterogeneous Cognitive Radio Networks

The exponential growth of wireless data traffic has pushed wireless network vendors and researchers to seek for new paradigms to revolutionize the traditional communication technologies to support 100 times the network capacity of the current communication systems. Therefore, cognitive radio (CR) has been one of the most promising technologies for the next generation communication system, such as 802.11af and the ongoing efforts to define CR for LTE-A and beyond systems. In view of this development trend, in this paper, we propose a control channel design for heterogeneous CR networks (CRNs) that also incorporate the WiFi air interface. Based on the proposed control channel, an analytical model is further developed to analyze the throughput for a certain kind of these heterogeneous CRNs. Both the analytical and simulation results are presented and discussed.