Exploring the Effect of Various Cluster Structures on Energy Consumption and End-to-End Delay in Cognitive Radio Wireless Sensor Networks

The growing demand and wide deployment of cost effective wireless communication networks, and the challenges related to its technical design and operations have necessitated the work on the more efficient use of the very limited radio frequency spectrum, limited energy resources and reduction of the end-to-end delay as an integral part of the next generation smart wireless networks. In this paper, we explore three different cognitive radio wireless sensor networks cluster structures; modified single-hop structure, multihop cluster structure, and hybrid cluster structure. We study the effect of the three structures in multiple setups in regards to varying the selected area. The evaluation results of the suggested three structures are compared with the single-hop cluster. Extensive simulation results carried out using MATLAB package showed that the end-to-end delay is minimum for the hybrid algorithm on the expense of a slight increase in energy consumption compared with the single-hop and the multi-hop cluster structures. On the other hand, the multi-hop cluster structure is more energy consuming than the single-hop, but it achieves a wider coverage area.