Maximizing the lifetime of energy‐constrained cooperative spectrum sensing sensor network

Adding the cognitive capability to wireless sensor networks allows the sensors to monitor the spectrum and identify the spectrum holes to operate in different frequencies according to the radio environment which result in better spectrum utilization. Spectrum sensing is a main component in any cognitive radio network. In this paper, we propose a new cooperative sensing scheme based on energy detection for cognitive sensor networks which is constrained by the energy limitation of the wireless sensor elements. The proposed scheme minimizes the sensing energy for individual sensor and carefully selects the suitable participant sensors in each cooperative sensing process. This results in maximizing the lifetime of energy‐constrained wireless sensor networks. The proposed scheme also takes into consideration the constraints on the detection accuracy. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme prolonged the lifetime of the cognitive network, makes efficient usage of available spectrum by secondary users, and satisfy the target detection performance.