A MAC-Layer QoS Provisioning Protocol for Cognitive Radio Networks

Due to the proliferation of diverse network devices with multimedia capabilities, there is an increasing need for Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning in wireless networks. The MAC layer protocol with enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) in the IEEE 802.11-2007 is able to provide differentiated QoS for different traffic types in wireless networks through varying the Arbitration Inter-Frame Spaces (AIFS) and contention window sizes. However, the performance of high priority traffic can be seriously degraded in the presence of strong noise over the wireless channels. Schemes utilizing adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) technique have also been proposed for the provisioning of QoS. They can provide limited protection in the presence of noise but are ineffective in a high noise scenario. Although multiple non-overlapped channels exist in the 2.4 and 5 GHz spectrum, most IEEE 802.11-based multi-hop ad hoc networks today use only a single channel at anytime. As a result, these networks cannot fully exploit the aggregate bandwidth available in the radio spectrum provisioned by the standards. By identifying vacant channels through the use of cognitive radios technique, the noise problem can be mitigated by distributing network traffic across multiple vacant channels to reduce the node density per transmission channel. In this paper, we propose the MAC-Layer QoS Provisioning Protocol (MQPP) for 802.11-based cognitive radio networks (CRNs) which combines adaptive modulation and coding with dynamic spectrum access. Simulation results demonstrate that MQPP can achieve better performance in terms of lower delay and higher throughput.