Performance analysis of game based MAC protocol for cognitive radio based wireless network

A Cognitive Radio based Wireless Network (CRWN) is an emerging trend in wireless networks. Cognitive Radio (CR) has opened up many new opportunities to utilize the frequency spectrum to its fullest utiliza-tion. Many researchers and engineers are coming up with new protocols for CRWN. In this paper, existing MAC protocols for CRWN are studied and found that all the protocols are designed for optimized node performance but not the network performance. Moreover, individual node's optimized performance may harm network's performance. So, there is a gap of performance to be filled at an individual node and network-level. In this paper, the frame work of existing MAC protocol is modified to achieve the glo-bal optimized performance of CRWN under saturated and unsaturated traffic conditions. Also, majority of the existing work proposed their solutions assuming full information-based game theoretical models, whereas in this paper more realistic approach based on incomplete information is presented. A rigorous simulation study is carried out to compute various parameters such as channel capacity, throughput and delay to understand the limitations of the non-game theoretic approach. Later, a game theoretical frame-work to MAC protocol is applied for CRWN to improve the network performance in terms of these param-eters. It is shown that the application of game theory to the MAC layer avoids collision and reduces the delay by 54% and energy consumption leading to enhancement of the overall throughput of a network by 57% respectively.(c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

A study of existing MAC protocols for Cognitive Radio based Wireless Network (CRWN) reveals that these protocols are designed for optimizing individual node performance rather than the network performance. To address this gap, the framework of existing MAC protocol is modified in this paper to achieve global optimized performance at the network level. A realistic approach based on incomplete information is presented, and a game theoretical framework is applied to improve network performance in terms of channel capacity, throughput, and delay. Simulation results show significant improvements in collision avoidance, delay reduction, energy consumption, and overall network throughput.