A robust and energy efficient cooperative spectrum sensing scheme in cognitive wireless sensor networks

Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) is able to effectively solve the hidden terminal, depth attenuation, multipath shadows and other issues which are not addressed by the single-user sensing. Therefore, it has attracted a large amount of interest and several CSS algorithms have been proposed. However, they are not specifically tailored for cognitive wireless sensor networks (CWSNs) where transmission reliability, power management and interference avoidance are critical issues. In this paper, we propose a robust and energy efficient CSS scheme in CWSNs. Firstly, taking into account the limited energy of sensor node, especially the mobile node, we introduce the nodes of the network into multiple clusters for the CSS in order to save energy consumed in reporting results and exchanging information and extend the lifetime of the network. Secondly, we consider that some cognitive nodes may not work as expected. Hence, facing the problem of faulty nodes in clusters, we propose an evaluation method which considers simultaneously the node reliability and the mutually supportive degree among different nodes to support adapted decisions. Finally, after removing the node of low credibility, the energy efficiency and reliability of each cluster are improved significantly. Simulation results allow to validate that the proposed method outperforms the state of the art in energy efficiency and detection reliability, even in presence of faulty nodes.