Load aware energy-balanced data gathering approach in CRSNs

Cognitive radio sensor network (CRSN) is a combination of two different prominent technologies named as wireless sensor network (WSN) and CR network (CRN). There are different related issues of two different technologies such as energy and hardware for WSN and dynamic spectrum for CRN. CRSN constitutes the research challenges in designing efficient communication protocol in resource constraints network. So, energy-balanced transmission is necessary to prolong the lifetime of WSNs. It ensures uniform average energy consumption among all the nodes. Data gathering approach in traditional sensor network suffers uncontrolled interference in the unlicenced spectrums as these spectrums are gradually getting crowded. CRSN network can provide a solution to spectrum scarcity in unlicenced channels. This study proposes a load aware energy balancing approach to maximise the network lifetime. It also proposes a dynamic channel sensing and accessing algorithm to optimise the energy consumption when the quality of unlicenced spectrum deteriorates. Once the event gets detected, the proposed routing protocol's objective is to transmit the data through energy-efficient path from source to destination. Its performance is evaluated through extensive simulations. Simulation results demonstrate a significant improvement over closely related works.