A composite channel hopping algorithm for blind rendezvous in heterogeneous cognitive radio networks

In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), rendezvous is the vital step prior to the communication between two unlicensed secondary users (SUs), where the SUs hop on the same channel at the same time to establish a link. With the dramatic fall in the cost and size of wireless transceivers, it becomes more reasonable to apply multiple radios to achieve significant improvement in the rendezvous performance. However, most of the existing multiradio rendezvous algorithms are proposed for homogeneous CRNs where all the SUs are equipped with an equal number of radios and do not possess backward compatibility to SU with a single radio. In reality, the CRNs are heterogeneous in nature as SUs may have different numbers of radios. In this paper, a composite CH algorithm is proposed for an asynchronous and heterogeneous network to achieve blind rendezvous with full rendezvous diversity. An SU with m number radios are categorized into three groups those follow different channel hopping (CH) algorithms. The upper bound of the rendezvous latency is being evaluated with a brief theoretical and mathematical analysis. Extensive simulations have conducted for different performance metrics, and the results are compared with the state-of-art algorithms. Overall, the proposed algorithm shows better performance in heterogeneous CRNs.