Multiple Radios for Fast Rendezvous in Heterogeneous Cognitive Radio Networks

In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), if two unlicensed secondary users (SUs) want to communicate with each other, they need to rendezvous with each other on the same channel at the same time. Rendezvous is the first key step for SUs to be able to communicate with each other. Channel hopping (CH) is a representative technique to solve the rendezvous problem in CRNs. SUs equipped with multiple radios can significantly reduce the time-to-rendezvous (TTR) for several existing CH algorithms while the additional cost is low. However, several drawbacks exist in the existing CH algorithms based on multiple radios. One of the main drawbacks is that they cannot be well applied in heterogeneous CRNs. The reason is that the number of radios for different SUs is implicitly assumed same or must be more than one in the existing CH algorithms based on multiple radios, which is unrealistic for heterogeneous CRNs. In heterogeneous CRNs, SUs may be equipped with different numbers of radios including one radio. To mainly address the above issue, hybrid radios rendezvous (HRR) algorithm is proposed in this paper. Moreover, the upper bounds of maximum TTR (MTTR) for the HRR algorithm are derived by a theoretical analysis. Furthermore, extensive simulations are performed to evaluate the expected TTR (ETTR), the MTTR, and the channel qualities of the rendezvous channels for the HRR algorithm. Simulation results show that rendezvous can be guaranteed by the HRR algorithm in heterogenous CRNs. Besides, the qualities of the rendezvous channels can be improved by the HRR algorithm. In addition, our algorithms can achieve rendezvous faster than several existing algorithms.