A Novel Control Channel Management in CogMesh Networks

The common control channel problem has become one of the main research challenges in a dynamic spectrum access (DSA) based ad hoc network without a global common channel. The basic question lies in how the control channels of the network are aligned in a reliable and distributed way with minimum management overhead. We propose in this paper a novel concept of the control channel cloud to handle this problem. A control channel cloud is a group of connected nodes using the same control channel. The idea is to have clouds evolved by merging so that few control channels are used in the network. In this paper the basic cloud operations are introduced to merge cloud in different situations. The cloud formation algorithms are proposed based on the cloud operations. We prove the convergence of the algorithms and study their performance by simulation.