Time synchronization for SHCS-MAC based multi-hop cognitive radio networks

Abstract

In CR networks, to share the conditions whether the channel is occupied or not, many existing researches generally adopt common control channel(CCC) and multiple radio transceivers due to easy design and implementation for multi-hop communications. However, they are resource wasteful because one channel should be always occupied for CCC and the radio transceiver is additionally required. In this paper, we propose a new time synchronization method for multi-hop communication by extending the SHCS-MAC protocol. We implemented the proposed time synchronization method on IEEE 802.15.4 Zigbee PHY based USRP SDR devices using GNU Radio and conduct the experiment to confirm it works properly.