Design, Implementation and Characterization of Practical Distributed Cognitive Radio Networks

Opportunistic Spectrum Access (OSA) in distributed cognitive radio networks (CRNs) has been well studied in the literature from a theoretical perspective. However, such theoretically-optimized distributed OSA approaches are challenged by several practical implementation issues. In this paper, we design a custom cross-layer framework that enables the: (i) clean-slate implementation of a wide variety of OSA mechanisms; (ii) experimental evaluation of the individual practical OSA components of the Rate-Adaptive Probabilistic (RAP) framework; and (iii) detailed comparison of the performance of such a practical OSA approach against theoretical OSA approaches developed for fully-capable CRNs. Our evaluation reveals the multi-fold goodput improvement and remarkable fairness characteristics of the practical RAP OSA approach compared to the OSA approaches that overlook the OSA and CR practical limitations. However, the superior performance of practical OSA comes at the expense of more outages to the primary licensed networks but within the permissible bounds. Another key finding is that the wide family of existing theoretically-optimized OSA protocols can benefit from the gains available to the individual components of the practical RAP approach, namely, the random spectrum sensing and the probabilistic non-greedy access.