Proposal of a Cognitive Based MAC Protocol for M2M Environments

The radio resource shortage is one of the most important issues to be taken into account when deploying modern wireless communication systems. A novel communication paradigm named cognitive radio, has been introduced in the last years for a more efficient exploitation of the limited available spectrum and cope with the inefficiency in the spectrum usage. Its main aim is to allow the co-existence of different wireless systems on the same spectral resources by limiting the mutual interference. The aim of this paper is to design a cognitive networking environment where the primary network is based on the OFDMA principle. The proposed Medium Access Control (MAC) technique for the secondary network, named Data Aided Cognitive Technique (DACT), aims to exploit the framing information broadcast by the primary network in order to setup transparently an independent network with a particular focus on Machine to Machine (M2M) communications.