An intra-cell peer to peer protocol in IEEE 802.22 networks

IEEE 802.22 mostly considers a typical cellular network with centralized control. Therefore, all intra-cell communications have to be via base stations. It not only leads to extra power consumption for intra-cell communications, but also only one channel can be used per time slot in the whole cell. This may lead to decrease in the network performance. Therefore, we propose a protocol called intra-cell peer to peer communication protocol (ICP2P) based on IEEE 802.22 protocol. The main accomplishments of ICP2P are to support direct intra-cell peer to peer communications between Customer Premises Equipments (CPEs), to allocate multiple channels per time slot in a cell, and to re-allocate same channels in one time slot. The network performance, such as capacity, channel usage and energy consumption, are significantly improved by ICP2P. Additionally, a weighed demand queue algorithm (WDQA) is proposed to guarantee the fairness in channel access opportunities for CPEs.