Performance analysis of multichannel medium access control algorithms for opportunistic spectrum access

Abstract—In this paper, different control channel (CC) im-plementations for multichannel medium access control (MAC) algorithms are compared and analyzed in the context of oppor-tunistic spectrum access (OSA) as a function of spectrum-sensing performance and licensed user activity. The analysis is based on a discrete Markov chain model of a subset of representative multi-channel OSA MAC classes that incorporates physical layer effects, such as spectrum sensing and fading. The analysis is comple-mented with extensive simulations. The major observations are given as follows: 1) When the CC is implemented through a ded-icated channel, sharing such dedicated channel with the licensed user does not significantly decrease the throughput achieved by the OSA network when the data packet sizes are sufficiently large or the number of considered data channels is small. 2) Hopping OSA MACs, where the CC is spread over all channels, are les