Self-scheduled MAC-layer protocol for spectrum sharing in cognitive radio communication

Recently, the spectrum scarcity has become the bottleneck for the development of wireless communication. Therefore, cognitive radio is a promising technology geared to solve the spectrum scarcity problem by opportunistically identifying the unused portions of the licensed user´s spectrum and establish the communication in the unutilised regime of the spectrum, while ensuring that the licensed or primary users of the spectrum are not affected. However, one of the major aspect and potential challenge is in the licensed channels, the sensing and access decision. In this paper, we have explored the concept of the multiple access control protocol for the distributed cognitive radio network. In this control channel protocol, the secondary users share the sensing results to each other and each channel is divided into four intervals such as idle, sensing-sharing, contention, and transmission. The sensing-sharing and contention interval are further divided into number of slots and throughput of the communication system has been computed.