Energy-efficient cooperative sensing for cognitive wireless sensor networks

Cognitive radio sensor networks (CRSNs) exploit the cognitive radio concept to allow wireless sensor networks to dynamically access the available channels. However, existing channel sensing techniques developed for cognitive radios are not applicable to the energy-constrained sensor nodes. In this paper, we present two energy-efficient cooperation schemes for CRSNs. The proposed schemes use randomized channel sensing, implicit cooperation, and simplified aggregation to reduce the energy consumed in channel sensing. The proposed implicit OR and implicit AND save up to 55% of the energy, reduce the decision taking time by 30.6%-95%, and achieve similar miss-detection performance compared to their explicit counterparts.