ROP: Near-optimal rendezvous for dynamic spectrum access networks

This paper presents a rendezvous scheme termed rendezvous with near-optimal performance (ROP) for dynamic spectrum access (DSA) networks. ROP distributes nodes in pairs onto different rendezvous channels without using a control channel and achieves near-optimal throughput, minimum expected time to rendezvous (ETTR), and channel load when the network is fully loaded. For large networks, we further propose an efficient variant of ROP, which is termed fast ROP (FROP), to significantly reduce the convergence time while still maintaining near-optimal performance. Moreover, the simulation results have shown that the convergence time of FROP is not only short but independent of the network size as well; hence, FROP has good scalability. We have developed mathematical models to analyze the performance of ROP and FROP. Both the analytical and the simulation results validate the near-optimal performance of ROP and FROP.