A cooperative spectrum sensing protocol for IEEE 802.15.4m wide-area WSNs

This paper proposes a channel allocation scheme for Wide-Area Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPAN) based on a cooperative centralized spectrum sensing approach. We refer here to a three-tiers LR-WPAN architecture, where we can distinguish the sensor devices level, the Child-coordinators level and, finally, the super LR-WPAN coordinator level. In the proposed scheme, channels allocation is performed by the LR-WPAN coordinator upon receiving the spectrum sensing reports from the Child-coordinators. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of resulting detection probability and throughput, in a scenario where Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) bands are saturated and different LR-WPANs compete to the channel access. Performance comparisons with a classical scheme where the channel allocation is accomplished without performing spectrum sensing, are also presented in order to highlight the advantages of the proposed scheme.