Special issue on recent developments in Cognitive Radio Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor nodes in traditional Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) use a fixed spectrum assignment policy and their performance is limited due to limited processing and communication power. In addition, these wireless sensor nodes require high bandwidth and their QoS requirements are application specific. Wireless sensor nodes with cognitive radio capabilities (i.e., Cognitive Radio Sensor Networks (CRSNs)), can help to address some of these WSNs limitations. However, there are several research challenges that need to be addressed in CRSNs. In fact, cognitive radio sensor network evolved from Wireless Sensor Networks in order to optimize the bandwidth and Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of wireless sensor nodes. Furthermore, CRSNs improve the spectrum utilization, and multiple overlaid sensor networks can be deployed in a specific region. But due to the inherent hardware and energy limitation of sensor nodes, incorporating cognitive radio (CR) capability in sensor nodes imposes challenges. In addition, CRSN nodes must handle additional constraints incurred by CR functionalities such as spectrum sensing, spectrum sharing, and spectrum management.