Sequence-based Neighbor Discovery in Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) Networks

In views of the shortage of the wireless spectrum, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted the rules that allow unlicensed transmitters to operate in TV bands so as to more efficiently use the spectrum resource. To enable such a new type of communication, referred to as “Dynamic Spectrum Access” (DSA), unlicensed devices should avoid interfering with the licensed devices. In general, the communication between unlicensed devices is intermittent, due to unpredictable interruption from licensed devices. Therefore, establishing a communication link between unlicensed devices (i.e., neighbor discovery) and maintaining the link in the DSA-based network are not as easy in the conventional wireless networks. In this thesis, we focus on the neighbor discovery issue and propose a sequence-based algorithm to guarantee link establishment between unlicensed devices. We then design a distributed MAC protocol to realize the sequence-based neighbor discovery and the corresponding channel access. In this protocol, there is no coordinator or any other access point. The unlicensed devices are guaranteed to find each other as long as there exists one commonly available channel. We implement our protocol in the OPNET Modeler and show the performance of our protocol in various scenarios.