REECR-MAC: Reliable and Energy Efficient Cognitive Radio MAC Protocol for Adhoc Networks

Cognitive radio technology can enhance spectrum usability by allowing secondary users to opportunistically access unused or under-utilized frequency bands. Although a number of ideas have been proposed for improving the performance of cognitive radio networks, but slight attention has been given to the selection of reliable data channel(s) and energy efficiency at MAC layer. In this paper, a novel reliable and energy efficient MAC protocol for cognitive radio adhoc networks has been proposed which selects the best data channel(s) with respect to the channel ranking to reduce the additional overhead at the control packets. To validate the idea, we have conducted analysis, where results show that the proposed REECR-MAC consumes less communication time and energy and achieves higher throughput as compared with CREAM-MAC and DSA-MAC protocols.