Dynamic Spectrum Access in Cognitive Radio based Tactical Networks

In this paper, we investigate how cognitive radio (CR) enabled devices can self-organize to form a tactical mesh network and operate on non-dedicated (secondary) spectrum. Each node in the network constantly senses the environment and maintains an up-to-date spectrum usage report. This report is used by a central controller (CC) to initialize the network formation. Then the other CR nodes gradually join the mesh network in a repeated, distributed manner. We provide the detailed steps for the mesh creation and also propose some refinements. We also compute the spectral efficiency that is achieved through our algorithm. Through simulation experiments, we study the effectiveness of the proposed schemes on mesh initialization latency, control signaling, collision rate during network initialization, and spectrum utilization.