Distributed coordination protocol for common control channel selection in multichannel ad-hoc cognitive radio networks

The exponential growth in wireless services has resulted in an overly crowded spectrum. The current state of spectrum allocation indicates that almost all usable frequencies have already been occupied. This makes one pessimistic about the feasibility of integrating emerging wireless services such as large-scale sensor networks into the existing communication infrastructure. Cognitive Radio is the emerging dynamic spectrum access technology to achieve open spectrum sharing flexibly and efficiently. It is an intelligent wireless communication system that is aware of its radio environment and is capable of adapting its operation to statistical variations of the radio frequency. Ad-hoc networks in terms of cognitive radio rely on a common control channel (CCC) for operation. Control signals are used to enable cooperation communicate through a common control channel. However, common control channel may not be always available in an open spectrum allocation scheme due to interference and coexistence with primary systems (PS) of the spectrum. In this paper, we propose a novel common control channel selection protocol (DCP-CCC) in a distributed way based on appearance patterns of PS and connectivity among nodes. Using simulation results, we evaluate the performance of the proposed CCC selection scheme.