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The adjacent channel interference (ACI) resulting from imperfect filtering can severely degrade the performance of any wireless communication system. Despite this fact, most of previously proposed medium access control (MAC) protocols for cognitive radio networks (CRNs) were designed while ignoring the effects of ACI (assuming ideal filtering). The effect of ACI can be reduced by introducing guard bands (GBs). However, this solution comes at the expense of degrading spectrum efficiency. In this paper, we develop an efficient GB-aware MAC protocol that attempts at maximizing network throughput while improving fairness in CRNs. Unlike most of previously proposed GB-aware MAC protocols that perform channel assignment sequentially, our MAC performs the channel assignment for multiple CR links simultaneously (the so-called batch method). Batching enables concurrent channel assignment for multiple CR links, which consequently allows for concurrent data transmissions. Batching can be realized by introducing an admission control phase for CR users to share their control information. The batch method can effectively provide distributed decisions that achieve better throughput while reducing the number of GBs. Our MAC also allows the CR users to utilize the reserved GBs of primary networks under predefined FCC power constraints. Simulation results indicate that our protocol achieves significant performance improvement compared to previous GB-aware protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Cognitive radio (CR) networks are expected to offer a huge bandwidth to wireless users through dynamic spectrum access techniques. To realize this new network paradigm, effective distributed coordination schemes to exchange control information without assuming the availability of a prespecified common control channel (CCC) are needed. In this paper, we propose a distributed group-based spectrum-aware coordination scheme for carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA)-based CR networks, which is called virtual clustering distributed coordination (VCDC). By using a CSMA/CA access mechanism, VCDC allows neighboring CR users with a similar view to spectrum opportunities to asynchronously organize themselves into virtual clusters and coordinate their communications using locally available CCCs. VCDC differs from previous cluster-based schemes in that it exploits the discrete orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (D-OFDM) technology to reduce neighbor-discovery time and facilitate intercluster communication and broadcasting. Three variants of the VCDC scheme are proposed, which are one-hop, two-hop, and constrained VCDC. These variants provide different cluster size based on the number of adopted local CCCs. We compare the performance of the VCDC scheme with existing clustering schemes. Simulation results show that VCDC constructs fewer larger size clusters with an appropriate number of common idle channels and introduces a lower percentage of clusters with no shared idle channels. Thus, VCDC performs better without imposing synchronization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Abstract: Cognitive radio (CR) is a revolutionary technology in wireless communications that enhances spectrum utilization by allowing opportunistic and dynamic spectrum access. One of the key challenges in this domain is how CR users cooperate to dynamically access the available spectrum opportunities in order to maximize the overall perceived throughput. In this paper, we consider the coordinated spectrum access problem in a multi-user single-transceiver CR network (CRN), where each CR user is equipped with only one half-duplex transceiver. We first formulate the dynamic spectrum access as a rate/power control and channel assignment optimization problem. Our objective is to maximize the sum-rate achieved by all contending CR users over all available spectrum opportunities under interference and hardware constraints. We first show that this problem can be formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem that is NP-hard, in general. By exploiting the fact that actual communication systems have a finite number of available channels, each with a given maximum transmission power, we transfer this MINLP into a binary linear programming problem (BLP). Due to its integrality nature, this BLP is expected to be NP-hard. However, we show that its constraint matrix satisfies the total unimodularity property, and hence our problem can be optimally solved in polynomial time using linear programming (LP). To execute the optimal assignment in a distributed manner, we then present a distributed CSMA/CA-based random access mechanism for CRNs. We compare the performance of our proposed mechanism with reference CSMA/CA channel access mechanisms designed for CRNs. Simulation results show that our proposed mechanism significantly improves the overall network throughput and preserves fairness. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article presents a survey which examines the challenges and developments of channel access protocols proposed for multihop cognitive radio networks. It discusses key design issues in development of medium access control (MAC) protocols for such networks. It also explores the development in MAC protocol design for CRNs. It outlines several challenges including the provision of an effective distributed coordination among CR users and computation of neighborhood-dependent power mask.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a modern network approach that replaces the conventional network architecture with a flexible architecture by separating the control plane from the data plane. SDN simplifies network management and monitoring through logically centralized intelligence, programmability, and abstraction. SDN architectures are vulnerable to attacks, such as the Denial of Service (DoS) attack. This article reviews and classifies the research efforts on SDN and DoS. We categorized the research efforts into two groups: solutions to cope with DoS attacks on SDN and SDN-based solutions to tackle DoS attacks on networks. The first group of solutions includes six categories: Table-Entry, Scheduling, Architectural, Flow Statistics, Machine Learning, and Hybrid solutions. Furthermore, the article surveys the tools and datasets considered by the reviewed contributions. The article presents a detailed comparison among reviewed approaches in terms of network devices, network layers involved, DoS attack's types, and targets of attacks. [Display omitted] • Software-Defined Networking architectures are vulnerable to Denial-of-Service attacks. • A review on solutions to cope with Denial-of-Service attacks on Software-Defined Networking. • A review on Software-Defined Networking based solutions to tackle Denial-of-Service attacks. • About 72.9% of the solutions used control layer modules. • The article surveys the tools and datasets considered by the reviewed contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]