Delay performance evaluation for supporting heterogeneous traffic in cognitive radio sensor networks

Traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs) working in the license-free band, suffering from heavy interference as the license-free spectrum becomes increasingly crowded. Designing a WSN based on cognitive radios could be a promising approach in the near future to provide data transmissions with strict QoS requirements. In this paper, the heterogeneous traffic including real-time and best effort traffic is considered in a cluster-based cognitive radio sensor network (CRSN). Using the reservation-based policy, satisfactory to the latency requirements of CBR traffic can be achieved and adequate time can be reserved for serving the BE traffic simultaneously. We analyze the delay performance of the real-time traffic, and verify the analytical results using computer simulations. The results show that satisfactory to the latency requirements of CBR traffic can be achieved and adequate time can be reserved for serving the BE traffic at the same time. And the radio resources can be utilized efficiently.