An energy aware event-driven routing protocol for cognitive radio sensor networks

Cognitive radio sensor network (CRSN) is an intelligent and reasonable combination of cognitive radio technology and wireless sensor networks. It poses significant challenges to the design of topology maintenance techniques due to dynamic primary-user activities, which in turn decreases the data delivery performance of the network as well as it’s lifetime. This paper aims to provide a solution to the CRSN clustering and routing problem using an energy aware event-driven routing protocol (ERP) for CRSN. Upon detection of an event, the ERP determines eligible nodes for clustering according to local positions of CRSN nodes between the event and the sink and their residual energy levels. Cluster-heads are selected from the eligible nodes according to their residual energy values, available channels, neighbors and distance to the sink. In ERP, cluster formation is based on relative spectrum awareness such that channels with lower primary user appearance probability are selected as common data channels for clusters. For data routing, ERP employs hop-by-hop data forwarding approach through the CHs and primary/secondary gateways towards the sink. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed ERP provides with better network performances compared to those of the state-of-the-art protocols under a dynamic spectrum-aware data transmission environment.