Throughput Analysis of the IEEE 802.11 DCF in Cognitive Radio Networks

This paper presents an analysis estimating the saturation throughput of the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) in Cognitive Radio (CR) networks. Among the many CR network paradigms, the one where existing wireless networks continue to work in the cognitive radio context is attractive and of great importance for CR study and deployment. The performance of the IEEE 802.11 DCF with cognitive radio thus emerges as an important topic. We present an analytical method based on a Markov chain model to estimate the saturation throughput of the IEEE 802.11 DCF with cognitive radio. We also show simulation results validating the presented throughput analysis. Our main contributions are that we propose the abstracted network concept in the context of CR networks and based on this concept we revise an existing Markov chain model to derive the saturation throughput of the IEEE 802.11 DCF in CR networks.