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.

In this paper, a Spectrum-Aware Routing (SAR) protocol for cognitive radio ad hoc networks, (CRAHN), is proposed which is robust to primary user activity and node failures. The protocol allows nodes to collect spectrum information during a spectrum management interval followed by a transmission period. Cognitive users discover routes by joint channel and next hop selection (synchronization) in the transmission intervals. A restricted geographical routing approach is adopted to avoid performance degradation specially due to routing overhead. We also add spectrum mobility capabilities to routes in our proposed method to provide robustness to primary user activity. SAR protocol performance is investigated through simulations of different scenarios and is compared with the most similar work, CAODV protocol. The results indicate that SAR can achieve significant reduction in control overhead as well as improved throughput.