Cognitive Radio Sensor Networks

The increasing demand for wireless communication introduces efficient spectrum utilization challenge. To address this challenge, cognitive radio has emerged as the key technology, which enables opportunistic access to the spectrum. The main potential advantages introduced by cognitive radio are improving spectrum utilization and increasing communication quality. These appealing features match the unique requirements and challenges of resource-constrained multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Furthermore, dynamic spectrum access stands as very promising and spectrum-efficient communication paradigm for WSN due to its event-driven communication nature, which generally yields bursty traffic depending on the event characteristics. In addition, opportunistic spectrum access may also help eliminate collision and excessive contention delay incurred by dense deployment of sensor nodes.