BiRD—A Novel Bi-Dimensional Design to Multi-Channel Continuous Rendezvous in Cognitive Networks

The rapid growth of wireless networking technologies, along with the emergence of several new devices that offer or need Internet connection and an ever-increasing demand for wide-band access, especially away from the urban centers, aggravates the problem of the frequency spectrum exhaustion for telecommunications services. The need for more efficient use of the spectrum increases the demand for solutions such as the improvement and deployment of radios with cognitive ability. In this context, this work seeks to contribute to solve the so-called multi-channel rendezvous problem, presenting an asynchronous, distributed and robust mechanism to promote rendezvous and communication opportunities between two or more cognitive radios. The proposed solution employs frequency hopping with new sequences based on combinatorial design theory. Our evaluation indicates that our proposal is able to improve the expected time to rendezvous up to 131% for the same control overhead with respect to existing approaches.