ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses medium access control (MAC) protocols in the context of cognitive radio networks (CRNs). It describes interframe spacing in carrier sense multiple accesses with collision avoidance based protocols. There are several MAC protocols that have been designed without common control channel (CCC). There are: Jamming-based MAC, Interleaved carrier sense multiple access, Multichannel Medium Access Control and Synchronized MAC. cognitive radio MAC protocols can be classified into three categories: Random access protocols, Time-slotted protocols and Hybrid protocols. The chapter addresses Quality of Service (QoS) and mobility support in CR MAC. Secondary users (SUs) may carry multiple types of traffic with different QoS requirements. On the other hand, the resources that are available to SUs are highly dynamic. This is because the reserved spectrum bands experience random use by primary users (PUs). QoS-aware MAC protocols' requirements include real-time and heterogeneous traffic to ensure fairness among competing nodes, minimize access delay, maximize channel utilization and throughput.
