Abstract—Today’s wireless networks are regulated by government organizations where a fixed spectrum is assigned to license holders for a specific geographic region. The spectrum usage is dominated in some areas and a major amount of it is underutilized. The spectrum utilization ranges from 15% to 85% depending on the area and time of usage. The limited spectrum availability and its inefficient use have lead to the development of new approaches where licensed and unlicensed networks can exist in the same area and utilize the existing spectrum in the most efficient manner. One such approach is to use a spectrum sensor network to sense the spectrum availability in the primary network (licensed network) and provide the details to the cognitive wireless sensor network (secondary network or unlicensed network). In this paper we propose a novel algorithm for cognitive wireless sensor network to use the available spectrum in the primary network in an opportunistic manner. The main aim of our algorithm is to optimize the data aggregation and transmission process by using hard and soft thresholds while routing the data in the cognitive wireless sensor network. Our approach when applied to a sensor field reduces the amount of data being transmitted throughout the network and helps in increasing the lifetime of the network. This helps the cognitive wireless sensor network in making quick and right decision while selecting the channel in which it can operate in the primary network. We show that our approach outperforms other existing solutions such as leveling, gossiping and PASCAL up to 35% and is more energy efficient than these solutions.
Index Terms—Leveling, gossiping, clustering, cognitive wireless sensor network, spectrum sharing, spectrum holes.
S. Quadri is currently working at Tech Mahindra Limited, Pune. India (e-mail: shahansha.quadri@techmahindra.com).
G. Rama Murthy is from International Institute of Information Technology. Hyderabad, India (e-mail: rammurthy@iiit.ac.in).
Cite: Shahansha Quadri and Garimella Rama Murthy, "ETSHRA: Energy Efficient Threshold Sensitive Hierarchical Routing Algorithm for Cognitive Wireless Sensor Networks," International Journal of Information and Electronics Engineering vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 213-215, 2012.