Energy efficient MAC protocol for cluster formation in mobile cooperative spectrum sensing

In cooperative spectrum sensing, clustering of the sensor nodes is vastly employed in order to reduce overall energy expenditure due to reporting while preserving high detection performance. Cluster formation is especially difficult for mobile networks since the clusters immediately become invalid. In the mobile scenario, the cluster forming algorithm should take into account the total energy expenditure, detection performance, and fairness between mobile nodes in terms of energy consumption. In this paper, we address these issues with a novel energy and congestion efficient MAC layer protocol for cluster formation to be utilized in mobile cognitive radio networks. Cluster formation is employed to eliminate some of the excess reporting frames containing less informative channel measurement information and consequently reduce overall energy expenditure. We show that the proposed method can achieve solid results in terms of detection, false alarm, and location estimation performance while saving substantial amount of energy.