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Typical MAC protocols for IEEE 802.11-based ad hoc networks employ a direct transmission strategy whenever the transmitter can directly reach the receiver (one-hop transmission). While such a design enjoys simplicity, it limits the number of admitted transmissions in a given neighborhood. Due to the performance anomaly of 802.11-based wireless networks, transmission with low data rates occupy the shared medium for longer periods of time. Occupying the transmission medium for a longer period of time results in less available transmission time for other nodes, which consequently reduces the number of transmitted packets during the same period of time, leading to a reduction in network throughput. To improve the overall network throughput, we present a cooperative multi-channel MAC protocol for single-hop wireless mobile ad hoc networks that attempts at computing the path with the minimum required transmission time for a given source–destination pair (including the channel assignment along that path). The proposed protocol attempts at improving network performance by means of cooperative communications. According to our approach, if the one-hop (direct) path between communicating nodes supports low data rate (requires longer transmission time), the source selects a multi-hop path to the destination such that the total amount of required transmission time is minimized. Through simulations, we show that our proposed protocol achieves significant throughput and fairness improvement compared to the standard IEEE 802.11-based protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emerging IEEE 802.22-based Wireless Regional Area Network (WRAN) is the first wireless standard based on the Cognitive Radio (CR) technology. WRAN is designed to offer wireless access services in a large coverage area by allowing Secondary Users (SUs) to opportunistically exploit the under-utilized licensed portion of spectrum that is primarily allocated for TV services. To enable efficient WRAN communications, the operation of a WRAN system should address two types of coexistence problem: incumbent co-existence and self-coexistence. In this paper, we investigate the self-coexistence problem in a multi-cell WRAN system that adopts an exclusive spectrum sharing policy. Specifically, we present an adaptive channel allocation scheme based on a cooperative max–min weighted fair allocation strategy. The proposed scheme is based on a centralized sensing mechanism that identifies the available spectrum opportunities for the WRAN cells. Our scheme dynamically allocates the available spectrum (idle channels) to the WRAN cells based on their expected traffic loads such that the total number of simultaneously admitted SU transmissions in the WRAN system is maximized. The expected traffic load is accurately estimated using a sample mean estimator based on previously monitored traffic in each cell. Simulation results indicate that our scheme is quite robust to traffic estimation error. Compared to reference spectrum allocation schemes, simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme effectively exploits the available spectrum opportunities by increasing the total number of served SU transmissions, which consequently results in a significant enhancement in the overall WRAN system performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]