MAC protocol identification approach for implement smart cognitive radio

Cognitive radio (CR) is regarded as a solution to address the spectrum scarcity issue in wireless communications. In CR, an unlicensed network user is enabled to dynamically/adaptively access the frequency channels according to the current state of the radio environment and, therefore, CR refers to a smart radio as defined in an “observe-learn-decision” cognitive cycle. In this paper, we consider the medium access control (MAC) protocols as radio parameters in the cognitive cycle, and propose a new approach called MAC protocol identification to implement smart cognitive MAC. The MAC protocol identification approach enables CR users to sense and identify the network MAC protocol types. The identification results will be used by CR users to adaptively change their transmission parameters in order to improve the spectrum hole utilization efficiency, save energy, minimize the interference to the primary users, as well as facilitate communications among heterogeneous CR networks. To verify that the MAC protocol identification is feasible, we propose a MAC identification process based on machine learning techniques in this paper, and some experimental results are presented.