Multi-Destination Rendezvous in Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

In cognitive radio (CR) networks, rendezvous is when two secondary users tune to the same frequency channel simultaneously so that they can communicate with each other. Reducing the rendezvous delay, a.k.a the time to rendezvous (TTR), has been a highly focused topic for research. Many existing papers have tried to reduce the TTR between a pair of secondary users (SUs). To the best of our knowledge, no paper has previously considered the multi-destination rendezvous issue where a SU sender has different packets in its buffer for multiple destinations. Those who approached a similar scenario relied on a common control channel or the existence of multiple radios. In this research, we consider blind rendezvous using a single radio. We propose a new rendezvous protocol to handle the multiple destination scenario to decrease the overall TTR and increase the throughput, thus enhancing the overall performance of the CR network. Extensive simulations are carried out to demonstrate the performance of the proposed multi-destination rendezvous protocol.