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 utilization. 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 global 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 framework to MAC protocol is applied for CRWN to improve the network performance in terms of these parameters. 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.