Analysis of Key Technologies for Cognitive Radio

Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Jian-guang Jia, Zun-wen He, Jing-ming Kuang, and Hui-Fen Wang
Research Institute of Communication Technology
Beijing Institute of Technology
Beijing, China
jjguang@foxmail.com

AbstractWireless sensor networks (WSNs) currently operate in

the unlicensed industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) spectrum
band. However, more and more wireless equipments make this
band overcrowded. The tremendous growth in the applications of
WSNs has posed great challenges for the precious radio
electromagnetic spectrum resource. The limited wireless
spectrum resource will be the bottleneck for the large-scale
popularization of WSNs. By contrast, the utilization rate of
licensed spectrum is very low, and some bands are actually never
occupied. It is promising and also challenging for WSNs to adopt
the cognitive radio (CR) technology to sense spectrum hole and
utilize the vacant frequencies to improve the spectrum utilization
rate and communication validity. On the basis of detailed
analysis of the involved key technologies for CR-based WSNs, the
related solutions are introduced. In addition, a new hardware
structure of sensor node is proposed and energy-saving design
strategies are discussed.
Keywords- cognitive radio; wireless sensor network; key
technologies

I.

INTRODUCTION

Regarded as the second largest network after the internet,

wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming a hot area of
global concern. The famous Oak Ridge National Laboratory
(ORNL) asserts: IT era is from the "computer or network" into
a "sensor that is, network". So far, the development of sensor
networks has experienced five stages from the end of last
century. The WSNs with modern meaning consist of spatially
distributed autonomous devices, which make use of sensors to
cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions,
such as temperature, humidity, sound, pressure, motion or
pollutants etc., at different locations [1][2]. As one of the most
important technologies for the 21st century [3], the WSN
technology provides us with a brand-new method for acquiring
information and processing information. To the end, WSNs
will become the interface between real world and digital world.
To provide ubiquitous wireless service, the large scale
application of WSNs is inevitable. As a precondition, the
problem of contending over spectrum resource with other
equipments must be solved. That is, WSNs communicate
reliably, but they cannot interfere with other equipments.
Currently, the operating frequencies of WSNs are in industrial,
scientific and medical (ISM) band. However, more and more
wireless equipments, such as interphone, WLAN, WPAN,
RFID, WirelessUSB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee and so on,

make this unlicensed band overcrowded. The tremendous

growth in the applications of WSNs has posed great challenges
for the precious radio electromagnetic spectrum.
The investigation results from Federal Communication
Commission (FCC) show that the utilization of the licensed
spectrum is very low (about 15%85%) under the current
fixed spectrum allocation scheme [4]. As a matter of fact, some
licensed frequency bands are only partially occupied, and some
other frequency bands are largely unoccupied most of time [5].
Cognitive radio (CR) [6][7], inclusive of software-defined
radio, has been proposed in order to promote the efficient use
of the spectrum by exploiting the existence of spectrum hole[8],
which is defined as a band of frequencies assigned to a primary
users (PUs), but at a particular time and specific geographic
location, the band is not being utilized by that user.
It is promising and challenging for WSNs to adopt the CR
technology to sense spectrum hole and utilize the vacant
frequencies to improve the spectrum utilization and
communication validity. Despite the extensive volume of
research results on WSNs and cognitive radio networks
(CRNs), the CR-based WSN is a vastly unexplored field with
only a handful of studies [9][10][11]. The existing protocols
and algorithms devised for CRNs and WSNs are not perfectly
fit for CR-based WSNs. Our object is to provide a clear picture
of the involved key technologies and the corresponding
solutions.
II.

COMMUNICATION MODEL AND NODE STRUCTURE

A. CR-base WSN Communication Model

Figure 1. A typical communication model of CR-based WSNs

978-1-4244-3709-2/10/$25.00 2010 IEEE

Typically, a large number of sensor nodes are deployed in a

specific monitor area. We assume, in the monitor area, there is
a base station, which provides broadcasting service for the
primary users, and most of the sensor nodes are within its
coverage region. The communication model is illustrated in
Fig.1. The nodes organize themselves into local clusters, with
one node acting as the cluster head. All non-cluster-head nodes
in a cluster transmit their data to the cluster head at given time
slots according to TDMA scheme, while the cluster head
receives data from its members, performs signal processing
functions on the data, and transmits the data to the dedicated
sink. To prolong the network lifetime, a cluster head rotation
mechanism is taken and consequently the energy load of
network is evenly distributed among all the sensor nodes.
The sensor nodes cooperatively detect potentially vacant
bands and transmit the detection results to the sink. The
spectrum decision is ultimately determined by the sink.
Depending on the spectrum availability, sensor nodes transmit
their readings in an opportunistic manner to the next hops and
finally to the sink.
B. Hardware Structure of CR Sensor Node
As depicted in Fig.2, a typical hardware structure of CR
sensor node consists of power unit, processing module, sensor
module and CR module, etc. The main difference between the
hardware architecture of a classical sensor node and a CR
sensor node is the transceiver of a CR sensor node. Under the
control of processing module, the sensor node has the ability to
adapt its communication parameters such as carrier frequency,
transmission power, and modulation. Another issue needs to
note that the CR sensor node inherits the limitation of
conventional sensor node in terms of power, communication,
processing, and memory resources [12], which severely
restricts the features of cognitive radio. Considering that the
majority of energy consumption of system comes from wireless
communication module [13], it is necessary to take low
consumption design, as well as energy saving protocols. From
the system design complexity and energy-saving point of view,
it is maybe not always a perfect choice to adopt multi-carrier
techniques in many application scenarios.

Figure 2. Hardware architecture of CR Sensor node

III.

KEY TECHNOLOGIES OF CR-BASED WSNS

A. System Architecture of CR-based WSNs

The system architecture, belonging to top level design, is
the prerequisite and foundation for protocols, and fundamental
framework for analyzing problems. The current proposed CR
architectures, such as Spectrum Pooling [14], CORVUS [15]
etc., have their respective merits and drawbacks and do not
take account of the data-centric and energy-limited properties
of WSN, so they cannot be adopted by CR-based WSNs
indiscriminately. The new system architecture for CR-based
WSN is supposed to support the following basic features:

Providing local radio collision information by scanning

spectrum rapidly.

Data-packet-based adaptive spectrum handoff and

waveform control in physical layer.

Spectrum etiquette protocols and

dynamic spectrum application strategy.

Dynamically adaptive MAC protocol with efficient

energy-saving strategy.

Cross-layer protocol integrating physical layer, MAC

layer and network layer mechanism.

Cross-layer energy management.

Network protocol supporting network convergence

with IPv6 network.

session-based

B. Re-recognize Cognitive Cycle

Cognitive cycle [5][6] plays an important role in analysing
the cognitive process. We also introduce it in our study. As
illustrated in Fig.3, the process consisting of three
fundamental tasks starts with the passive sensing of RF slimuli
and culminates with action. The involved key technologies
mainly include:
1)
Cooperative spectrum holes detection: To improve
detection performance by cooperation. According to protocol
stack, this process occurs in physical layer. Spectrum detection
is the process that cognitive sensor nodes detect ambient radioscene to find spectrum holes. When WSN operates in licensed
spectrum bands, it needs to continuously detect the PUs
behavior. Once the presence of a PU is detected, the WSN
must take the initiative to return the "borrowed" frequency
immediately to avoid interfering with PUs, since the PUs have
a top priority to access the licensed spectrum. By contrast,
when WSN operates in ISM bands, it only detects whether a
frequency is available or not. The current detection
technologies are as follows:
a) The method of detecting the PU transmitter. There
are three fundamental methods. Matched filter is the optimal
spectrum sensing method in Gaussian noise. However, it
requires a priori knowledge about PU transmission and
additional hardware for CR sensor node. Energy detection is
an attrative method for CR-based WSNs, due to its simplicity
and low signal processsing requirements. If the measured

Figure 3. Basic cognitive cycle of CR-based WSNs

energy on a channel is above the given threshold value, the

channel is considered unavailable. It is notable that an
unsuitable threshold may lead to high undetected probability.
In addition, this method requires longer measurement duration
incurring high energy consumption. Another method is
cyclostationary feature detection. Generally, modulated
signals are coupled with sine wave carriers, pulse trains,
repeating spreading, hoping sequences, or cyclic prefixes
which result in built-in periodicity [16]. Since their statistics,
mean and autocorrelation exhibit periodicity, these modulated
signals are characterized as cyclostationary, even though the
data is a stationary random process. This method exploits
spectrum correlation of PU signals, and hence is robust against
variations of noise. Howerer, it has very high complexity and
long observation time.
b) The method of detecting the receiver of PU. When
the receiver of PU works, some of the local oscillator (LO)
power actually couples back through the input port and
radiates out of the antenna. By detecting the LO leakage
power, the appearance of PU can be detected theoretically.
However, it is difficult for a CR sensor node to detect this
power directly over larger distances, and is impractical for the
variable power [17]. Deploying some sensor nodes close to
the primary receiver is an effective measure. Another
important method is detecting interference temperature
proposed by FCC. In this method, sensor nodes calculate how
much interference they would cause at the PU receiver and
adjust their transmission power so that their interference plus
the noise floor does not exceed a certain interference
temperature level. Two fundamental proplems in this method
need to solve: PU location and interference temperature
margin.
c) Cooperative Sensing. Since signals are susceptible to
shadow effects and multi-path fading in wireless environment,
using separate nodes to detect vacant frequencies is very
inefficient, and usually incurs high undetected probability.
Cooperative sensing can overcome these negative effects, and
consequently improves the spectrum detection efficiency and
accuracy. However, more extra channel bandwidth is needed
for obtaining a satisfactory detection performance. A solution
is data compression. Research shows that a 2-3bit of

quantization cannot lead to obvious performance degradation.

The mechanism of this method is generally of difference
according to network topologies. In centralized network, there
exists a sink performing collecting results from sensor nodes,
and it has a master and slave relation with these nodes. The
sensing process is briefly described as: the sensor nodes
respectively detect the vacant frequencies, and then transmist
their information to the sink; on the basis of further analyzing
and aggregating treatments about the collected data, the sink
makes ultimate spectrum decision according to the obtained
spectrum situations. In distributed systems, a node obatins the
sensing information by trunking. Typically, in ad hoc network,
when a node receives the authorized user signal, it will
transmit it to other nodes via relay nodes in order to achieve
collaborative spectrum sensing. In cluster-based network,
cluster heads handle the sensing information from their
members, and then make final spectrum decision; this decision
is maybe made by sink which depends on the network scale
and protocol algorithms etc.
Data fusion is the foundation of cooperative spectrum
sensing, and essentially, is that specific nodes collect and
process the sensing information from other nodes, and then
educe final spectrum decision, illustrated in Fig.4. Therefore,
cooperative spectrum sensing can be equivalent to a
mathematical problem: based on some fusion criterion (e.g.
AND, OR etc.), calculating the spectrum detection probability
of multi-sensor data fusion system. In addition, the involved
open issues include:

Collaborative collection and data fusion method based

on the constraint of energy limitation.

Relationship between spectrum detection performance

and the number of cooperative nodes.

Trade-off scheme of system performance and control

overhead.

Method of exploiting dynamic clusters to cooperatively

detect spectrum holes.

2) Cooperative Signal Recognition: To distinguish PU and

neighbor node signal from noise. Cyclostationary detection is
robust to random noise, since cyclic spectral correlation
function has the feature of distinguishing noise energy and
modulated signal energy.The related research mainly focus on
modulation type recogniton of sensing signal. The results in
TableI [18] show that the modulated signals cyclostationary
feathures lower the requirements of signal-to-noise radio
(SNR), which to some extent decreases the system complexity.

Figure 4. Cooperative sensing principle

TABLE I.

PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT RECOGNITION SCHEME

Feature Extraction

Classifier

SNR dB

-profile of cyclic spectrum

-profile of cyclic spectrum
Multifractal features
Wavelet features

Hidden Markov Model

Neural networks
Neural networks
WSVM

-9
-9-15
5
2

The results also show that single classifier is not enough to

classify all the modulated signals. Therefore, employing multisensor cooperation and multiple classifiers to improve the
recognition accuracy is a promising and exciting method.
3) Spectrum decision: To choose an optimal spectrum, and
realize spectrum dynamic access and sharing. Dynamic
spectrum access is also called dynamic spectrum management,
dynamic spectrum distribution or opportunistic spectrum
access etc. To sum up, it is a process of using some
mechanisms such as channel allocation, power control,
interference avoidance and opportunistic scheduling etc., to
realize the final objective of spectrum management. Spectrum
sharing can be considered as a problem of channel access
control in MAC layer. Its general process is: sensing spectrum
holes in ambient wireless environment; adjusting output power
of transmitters according to the sensing results; adaptively
choosing an optimal frequency combined with appropriate
modulation and coding strategy to communicate reliably.
The related research in this field is mainly based on the
Markov model, optimization theory and game theory. In
addition, the sensing information based CSMA/CA
mechanism is also a research hotspot. A great progress about
this issue has been made recently, however the current
algorithms are not proposed in allusion to CR-based WSNs.
And especially the features of limited energy and dynamic
topologies in WSNs are not taken into account.
As viewed from its implementation, spectrum decision can
be divided into three sub-processes: spectrum allocation,
spectrum access and spectrum handoff. Spectrum allocation is
equivalent to an optimization problem, which can be solved
with game theory method. The involved key issue is to
construct a utility function with constraint of minimized
energy consumption. The problem of spectrum access is to
design an efficient MAC protocol. The top priority is to trade
off between access delay and energy expenditure. Spectrum
handoff should conform to the rule of primary user priority.
4) Cooperatively adaptive power control: To limit the
interference with PUs within the range of tolerance
(interference temperature margin). The popular methods
mainly include Lagrangian relaxation method, Classical
method, quadratic programming, game theory and geometric
programming method, and so on. Among them, game theroy
exhibits a favorable performance in solving the optimization
problem of scarce resources. The games objective is to reach
the distributed optimum of resource allocation. The current
power control algorithms for CR networks are mainly limited
within some game framwork, and their common aim is to
improve system capacity, and satisfy specific QoS
requirements and fairness. However, reducing energy
expenditure and extending network lifetime is the primary

Recognition Accuracy%
AM

BPSK

FSK

4FSK

MSK

QPSK

4ASK

16QAM

98
96.7
NA
NA

99.6
98.5
95.5
97.5

100
99.1
92.0
94.5

NA
NA
NA
99.0

100
99.6
NA
NA

99.8
98.3
NA
98.5

NA
NA
98.9
98

NA
NA
96.3
100

design guideline for WSNs. Multi-sensor based cooperative

adaptive power control is a potential method.
C. Cross-layer Design Based on Cognition and Energy
Constraint
From the protocol stack point of view, the process of
cooperative spectrum sensing is generally collaboratively
achieved by physical layer, MAC layer and network layer,
which depends on network architecture. Cognitive process
introduces a lot of control overhead and consequently incurs
extra energy consumption. Therefore, for energy-limited CRbased WSNs, a cross-layer design contributes to the
improvement of network performance.
IV.

ENERGY-SAVING DESIGN STRATEGIES DISCUSSION

Since the power of sensor nodes are usually supplied by

batteries, the system protocol and hardware design need to
adhere to the energy-saving design principle, as well as the
miniaturization design.
The extra energy expenditure mainly comes from:

Multiple nodes participate in competition for the same

channel, and consequently lead to data collision.
Retransmitting the lost data will incur extra energy
consumption.

Nodes sometimes receive and process the data that do

not belong to them. The involved crosstalk makes
processor and wireless receiver module suffer from a
large amount of energy dissipation.

When nodes have no data to send, they will remain idle

listening to the radio channel in order to receive the
possible data sent to them. This excessive idle listening
will cause waste of energy.

Control overhead introduced by cognitive process

incurs excessive energy expenditure.

The spectrum sensing process prolongs the duty cycle

of receiver. Thus, to some extent, the system energy
consumption is increased.

The physical layer, responsible for data modulation and

demodulation, transmitting and receiving, is the key link of
node hardware design, which determines the volume, cost and
energy expenditure of system. As the core of a node, the
microcontroller should take low-power design, and have
multiple sleep modes. For special node like sink, besides the
mentioned features, it should support dynamic energy
management (DEM) and dynamic voltage scaling (DVS).
When interested events have not happened, DEM can turn off

partial modules or switch them to idle state. DVS is that, when

computing load is low, it can reduce the processing power by
reducing the operating voltage and frequency of the
microcontroller, thus saving the energy consumption. In order
to reduce hardware volume and increase the system stability, it
is better to choose digital sensors with build-in memory and
A/D. RF unit is the primary energy consumption component,
so a typical WSN node (e.g. MICA series) utilizes the
integrated RF transceiver, such as CC1000 and CC2420 etc.
Generally, most of these chips take lower-power and
miniaturization design, and their operating parameters can be
programmed flexibly, which is very beneficial for the node
design. However, the relative narrow operating frequency
range of a single chip greatly limits the awareness capacity of a
CR sensor node. Currently, a typical model of CR system is a
pipelining structure consisting of ADC/DAC, FPGA, DSP and
ASIC etc. This structure has a flexible programming feature
and data processing ability, but its energy consumption is
generally very considerable, and therefore has a higher power
supply requirement. Thus, the structure of employing RF
chipset companied with auxiliary RF circuits is a recommended
design.
In MAC layer, the means of lessening energy dissipation
mainly include reducing traffic, prolonging sleep time of RF
module and taking collision avoidance mechanism etc. Among
them, reducing traffic is a fundamental method, and is achieved
generally by adding a data fusion layer over the MAC layer or
network layer. However, the mature research results about data
fusion in MAC layer have not been reported. Even though
reducing duty cycle is an efficient energy-saving method, it
probably introduces a large amount of communication delay
and decreases the system throughput. MAC protocols need to
be designed according to specific applications.
The main goals of network layer protocol are summarized
as: establishment of energy-efficient routing; formation of
reliable data forwarding mechanism and implementation of the
longest network life cycle. For this layer, the increase of energy
efficiency can be obtained from the following aspects:
speeding up the convergence of network redundant data;
choosing energy-efficient routing to forward data with multihop method etc.
It is not practical to design all-purpose application layer
protocols. Nevertheless, a common feature of this layer is to
obtain data and conduct preliminary processing. Typically, in
the event-driven application like forest fire monitoring, when
event happens, mass of data will be collected by nodes. If the
data are directly sent to cluster head or sink without being
processed, it is likely to lead to network congestion. In addition,
considerable energy will be dissipated. A recommended
solution is to utilize data fusion and distributed database
techniques to refine data, and ultimately prolong network
lifetime and improve communication efficiency.
On the basis of considering the energy consumption of each
layer, taking cross-layer design approach may alleviate the
potential challenges in CR-based WSNs.
V.

CONCLUSIONS

Cognitive radio technology exhibits great potential for

improving spectrum utilization. It is promising and also

challenging to introduce this novel technology into WSNs to

solve the communication problem in complex electromagnetic
environment. The related research is relatively of scarcity. In
this paper, we firstly depict a typical cognitive scenario and
propose a new hardware structure of sensor node, then
comprehensively analyze the critical issues involved in
cognitive cycle in allusion to CR-based WSNs, and possible
solutions as well. We believe our work is heuristic to future
research.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors thank all the anonymous reviewers for their
valuable suggestions for this better paper.
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