The present disclosure describes the concept of operations and the medium access control protocols of a wireless communication system using code-division multiple access with interference avoidance (CDMA-IA) as its physical layer. The system can dynamically share a common band with other networks without a central radio resource controller. In one embodiment, the wireless communication system includes a plurality of radio nodes forming a wireless mesh network, wherein the pairs of radio nodes use, individually optimized, time division duplexing. At least one radio node includes a software-defined radio, a memory, and an electronic processor. The electronic processor is configured to control the software-defined radio to transmit a pilot signal and share various state information with the other nodes of the network. The shared information includes local spectrum occupancy and node connectivity sets. The pervasive sharing of spectrum occupancy among all nodes enables the usage of the shared band to be maximized.