Distributed and cheat-proof spectrum contention scheme for IEEE 802.22 WRAN networks

IEEE 802.22 wireless regional area networks (WRANs) are cognitive radio-based wireless networks that opportunistically access sub-900 MHz TV bands for their operations. IEEE 802.22 WRANs are continuously faced with self-coexistence problems. The adaptive on-demand spectrum contention (ODSC) protocol has been proposed as a possible solution to the problem of self-coexistence in such networks. Unfortunately, the design of ODSC protocol contains some major flaws, which makes the scheme cheat-prone and less efficient for resolution of spectrum contentions among networks. In this paper, we highlight the main problems associated with the implementation of ODSC as a spectrum contention protocol. We propose a scalable and cheat-proof scheme for spectrum contention that guarantees fairness and system efficiency. We show the performance of proposed scheme with different network topologies. Simulation results show substantial improvement in system performance via channel reuse, with significant levels of fairness in spectrum utilization.