Designing a medium access control (MAC) protocol is a key for implementing any practical wireless network. In general, a MAC protocol is responsible for coordinating users in accessing spectrum resources. Given that a user in cognitive radio(CR) networks do not have priority in accessing spectrum resources, MAC protocols have to perform dynamic spectrum access (DSA) functions, including spectrum sensing, spectrum access, spectrum allocation, spectrum sharing and spectrum mobility, beside conventional control procedure. As a result, designing MAC protocols for CR networks requires more complicated consideration than that needed for conventional/primary wireless network. In this paper, we focus on two major perspectives related to the design of a CR-MAC protocol: dynamic spectrum access functions and network infrastructure. Five DSA functions are reviewed from the point of view of MAC protocol design. In addition, some important factors related to the infrastructure of a CR network including network architecture, control channel management, the number of radios in the CR device and the number of transmission data channels are also discussed. The remaining challenges and open research issues are addressed for future research to aim at obtaining practical CR-MAC protocols.

Spectrum sensing is a key technology within Cognitive Radio (CR) systems. Cooperative spectrum sensing using a distributed model provides improved detection for the primary user, which opens the CR system to a new security threat. This threat is the decrease of the cooperative sensing performance due to the spectrum sensing data falsification which is generated from malicious users. Our proposed scheme, based on robust statistics, utilizes only available past sensing nodes' received power data for estimating the distribution parameters of the primary signal presence and absence hypotheses. These estimated parameters are used to perform the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence data fusion which causes the elimination of malicious users. Furthermore, in order to enhance performance, a node's reliability weight is supplemented along with the data fusion scheme. Simulation results indicate that our proposed scheme can provide a powerful capability in eliminating malicious users as well as a high gain of data fusion under various cases of channel condition.

Spectrum sensing is a fundamental function for cognitive radio network to protect transmission of primary system. Cooperative spectrum sensing, which can help increasing sensing performance, is regarded as one of the most promising methods in realizing a reliable cognitive network. In such cooperation system, however the communication resources such as sensing time delay, control channel bandwidth and consumption energy for reporting the cognitive radio node's sensing results to the fusion center may become extremely huge when the number of cognitive users is large. In this paper, we propose an ordered sequential cooperative spectrum sensing scheme in which the local sensing data will be sent according to its reliability order to the fusion center. In proposed scheme, the sequential fusion process is sequentially conducted based on Dempster Shafer theory of evidence's combination of the reported sensing results. Above all, the proposed scheme is highly feasible due to the proposed two ordered sequential reporting methods. From simulation results, it is shown that the proposed technique not only keeps the same sensing performance of non-sequential fusion scheme but also extremely reduces the reporting resource requirements.