SPC-MAC: A short preamble cognitive MAC protocol for cognitive radio sensor networks

Cognitive radio has been widely recognized as a promising solution to reliable and time-efficient wireless sensor networks. However, cognitive capability requires an extra energy consumption in spectrum sensing and spectrum access, which imposes a rather challenging problem to low cost sensors. This paper proposes a short preamble cognitive medium access control (SPC-MAC) protocol which supports reliable and fast spectrum access while addressing the energy conservation problem in cognitive radio sensor networks (CRSNs). The novelty of SPC-MAC lies in the combination of short preamble sampling (for supporting low duty cycling in CRSNs) and the opportunistic forwarding (for reliable and fast transmission). Because of the self-organizing nature, SPC-MAC does not require a common control channel. Extensive simulations demonstrate the advantage of SPC-MAC over existing works in terms of energy consumption and throughput.