Cooperation and Communication in Cognitive Radio Networks based on TV Spectrum Experiments

Cognitive radio (CR) ad hoc networks are composed of wireless nodes that may opportunistically transmit in licensed frequency bands without affecting the primary users of that band. In such distributed networks, gathering the spectrum information is challenging as the nodes have a partial view of the spectrum environment based on the local sensing range. Moreover, individual measurements are also affected by channel uncertainties and location-specific fluctuations in signal strength. To facilitate the distributed operation, this paper makes the following contributions: (i) First, an experimental study is undertaken to measure the signal characteristics for indoor and outdoor locations for the TV channels 21 - 51, and these results are used to identify the conditions under which nodes may share information. (ii) Second, a Cooperative reinforcement LearnIng scheme for Cognitive radio networKs (CLICK) is designed for combining the spectrum usage information observed by a node and its neighbors. (iii) Finally, CLICK is integrated within a MAC protocol for testing the benefits and overhead of our approach on a higher layer protocol performance. The proposed learning framework and the protocol design are extensively evaluated through a thorough simulation study in ns-2 using experimental traces of channel measurements.