Supporting fast neighbor discovery for cognitive radio networks

Neighbor discovery is a fundamental task in wireless ad hoc networks. For a cognitive radio network (CRN), it becomes a challenging problem because nodes may reside in different channels. A necessary condition for nodes to discover each other is that they have a rendezvous. Most of the existing neighbor discovery schemes and rendezvous-guaranteed schemes that can be used for neighbor discovery have some undesired requirements, such as demanding role pre-assignment, a common control channel, or a synchronous environment. In this paper, without such undesired requirements, we propose a staggered channel hopping scheme (SCH) which utilizes the Chinese reminder theorem to enable a node to quickly discover its neighbors. Simulations results verify the superiority of the SCH protocol.