Cognitive Radio Networks with Wireless Sensor Applications

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**Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), part of the fast*emerging Internet of Things will be playing vital role in transforming our*lives. Potentially huge number of these sensors will soon be deployed to*perform simple to complex tasks such as automatically controlling heat and*light in smart homes to guiding autonomous vehicles and missiles. Finding*adequate radio spectrum of these potentially numerous wireless sensors is a*major issue. While Industry Canada is struggling to allocate more frequency*bands, up to mm wave bands, many researchers' experimental studies show that*already allocated spectrum is typically underused by 25-30%. *** ***Cognitive radio (CR) networks are a new form of*intelligent wireless network where, the cognitive (secondary) users are*configured to coexist with licensed (primary) users without causing harmful*electromagnetic interference to them by opportunistic spectrum access. There*are a few steps in the successful implementation of a CR cycle. Namely,*spectrum awareness (achieved through sensing various spectrum parameters and*spectrum occupancy), analysis and decision making based on the observation, and*spectrum exploitation (adaptation). These basic functions need to be carried*out repeatedly in a cognitive radio network.*** ***Another challenge in WSN is providing energy.*Battery management and maintenance of these sensors can be a prohibitively*expensive exercise because of their abundance. Sensors' performance will*deteriorate with the remaining energy level and dead sensor nodes will affect*the performance of an entire network, especially in multi-hop networks.*Improper battery disposal will also cause environmental pollution and health*hazardous in the long run. *** ***The energy issue can be alleviated by energy*harvesting. The ambience has energy in the forms of light, heat, mechanical*vibrations and electromagnetic radiations. Especially, cognitive WSN can harvest*energy from the primary network. This energy has to be collected with*appropriate transducers, stored reliably and used for wireless data*transmission which is typically bursty. The sporadic and unreliable nature of*the energy harvesting process as well as characteristics of electronic elements*has to be appropriately modeled to design viable energy harvesting WSN. *** ***When the spectrum stealing CR functionality is*added to the energy harvesting wireless sensors, the research problem is very*challenging. However, it is essential to investigate this scenario due to the*pressing necessity. In addition, traditional requirements of wireless*communication such as appropriate quality of service, meeting latency,*throughput, fairness and reliability still have to be met by future cognitive*energy harvesting wireless sensor network. The proposed research program will*focus on this direction, investigating pressing issues in cognitive wireless*sensor networks and finding novel solutions. *** *** *** *** *** *** ******