TPO-MAC: Traffic-Priority-based Opportunistic MAC Protocol for Multi-Channel Cognitive Radio Networks

Opportunistic medium access control (MAC) protocol design is a challenging issue for multi-channel cognitive radio networks (CRN). This paper provides a novel traffic-priority-based opportunistic MAC (TPO-MAC) protocol in multi-channel CRN. An important mechanism in TPO-MAC is that whether the primary users (PUs) can access the licensed channels immediately depends on their traffic priority, which alleviates the collision between secondary users (SUs) and PUs. In order to investigate the performance of TPO-MAC, a Markov chain model is further proposed to derive the saturation throughput of TPO-MAC. We validate our model by extensive simulations and compare the performance of TPO-MAC with the results from other literature. The results show that TPO-MAC performs better than the existing opportunistic MAC protocols.