Design and Analysis of a Sensing Error-Aware MAC Protocol for Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we present a spectrum sensing error-aware MAC protocol for a cognitive radio (CR) network collocated with multiple primary networks. We explicitly consider sensing errors in the CR MAC design, since such errors are inevitable for practical spectrum sensors. Two spectrum sensing polices are presented with which secondary users collaboratively sense the licensed channels. The sensing policies are then incorporated into p-Persistent CSMA to coordinate dynamic spectrum access for CR network users. We present an analysis of the interference and throughput performance of the proposed CR MAC, and find the analysis highly accurate in our simulation studies. The proposed sensing error-aware CR MAC protocol outperforms two existing approaches with considerable margins in our simulations, which justify the importance of considering spectrum sensing errors in CR MAC design.