A Coordination Framework for Opportunistic Spectrum Access in Ad Hoc Networks

A unique property of open spectrum systems is the heterogeneity in spectrum access. This property provides challenges for MAC designers, including the elimination of common control channels for information exchange. In this paper, we propose a distributed, scalable and efficient coordination framework for Open Spectrum ad hoc networks that takes spectrum heterogeneity into account. The framework is an end-device based approach where devices dynamically select their coordination channel based on local conditions, removing the need for a predefined, commonly available spectrum slice for control traffic. Extensive simulation results show that our distributed channel selection algorithm performs similarly to a centralized near-optimal algorithm, and that under our framework with distributed coordination channels, TCP throughput between devices improves by a factor of 2-4 over a comparable scenario without channel coordination.