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MAC Layer Failure Control and Avoidance in Cognitive Radio Networks

Sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF)

Duration: October 2019 - September 2022

Investigator: Dr. Jiang (Linda) Xie (PI)

Students: Moinul Hossain, Munmun Talukder

Overview:

Cognitive radio has recently emerged as a promising technology to overcome the imbalance between the increase in spectrum access demand and the inefficiency in spectrum usage by allowing dynamic spectrum access. However, a fundamentally unexplored issue in cognitive radio networking design is how to avoid and control the failures at the medium access control (MAC) layer during spectrum access. This issue is becoming a serious barrier to the success of cognitive radio networks (CRNs). The potential MAC layer failures during spectrum access are unique in CRNs. They will significantly degrade the network performance and sometimes may even block the whole network's operation.

The research objective of this proposal is to design, analyze, and evaluate new MAC layer failure control and avoidance protocols for cognitive radio networks (CRNs) without a common control channel. The proposed MAC layer designs aim at minimizing the failure rate caused by various factors during spectrum access and minimizing the average spectrum access delay. This research is the first that systematically addresses the unique failures at the MAC layer during spectrum access in CRNs under practical scenarios.

Research Activities:

This project includes three major research tasks:

  • Rendezvous congestion control: to avoid network congestion and to speed up the rendezvous;

  • Handshake failure avoidance: to avoid synchronous deadlocks and to derive the optimal size of a time slot for handshake; and

  • Transmission failure mitigation: to adapt the optimal frame size and to maximize the overall throughput.

Publications:

  • Moinul Hossain and Jiang Xie, "Hide and Seek: A Markov-based Defense Strategy Against Off-sensing Attack in Cognitive Radio Networks," IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, 2020.

  • Moinul Hossain and Jiang Xie, "Jump and Wobble: A Defense Against Hidden Terminal Emulation Attack in Dense IoT Networks," Proc. International Conference on Communications (ICC 2021), June 2021.

  • Moinul Hossain and Jiang Xie, "Hidden Terminal Emulation: An Attack in Dense IoT Networks in the Shared Spectrum Operation," IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), December 2019.

Broader Impact:

This research will help generate innovative techniques to numerous applications of the CRN technology, e.g., public safety networks, emergency networks, health monitoring, home networking, and cognitive mesh networks. It will also have significant impacts on research in emerging technologies with dynamic spectrum access, such as vehicular networks, mobile health, and opportunistic interconnections of heterogeneous wireless networks. The proposed MAC layer designs can also be applied to systems of Internet-of-Things (IoT) with low-power, low-cost IoT devices dynamically accessing the wide spectrum.

Education Activities:

  • Curriculum Enhancement: research results on cognitive radio networks from this research are incorporated into the graduate-level courses.

  • Graduate Student Mentoring: two PhD students are working on the research of this project.

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