An Enhanced Method for the Quiet Period Synchronization of IEEE 802.22-Based Networks

To avoid interferences, network-wide quiet periods (QPs) are usually scheduled for the purpose of channel sensing in cognitive radio (CR) networks. The recent IEEE 802.22 draft standard requires that adjacent base stations (BSs) should synchronize their QP in scheduling. However, we find that the current design is incomplete in handling the dynamic of synchronized QP. The problem is that BSs cannot handle the decreasing of synchronized QP duration. This can cause the wastage of network resources. To solve the problem, we propose a synchronization counter (SC)-based method in this paper. With the method, the BSs can accurately synchronize the QP when the duration varies. It makes the synchronization more accurate and thus saves the network resources. We have verified the proposed scheme with simulation and provide the performance results that reveal the basic features of network-wide QP synchronization.