Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), part of the fastemerging Internet of Things will be playing vital role in transforming ourlives. Potentially huge number of these sensors will soon be deployed toperform simple to complex tasks such as automatically controlling heat andlight in smart homes to guiding autonomous vehicles and missiles. Findingadequate radio spectrum of these potentially numerous wireless sensors is amajor issue. While Industry Canada is struggling to allocate more frequencybands, up to mm wave bands, many researchers experimental studies show thatalready allocated spectrum is typically underused by 25-30%. Cognitive radio (CR) networks are a new form ofintelligent wireless network where, the cognitive (secondary) users areconfigured to coexist with licensed (primary) users without causing harmfulelectromagnetic interference to them by opportunistic spectrum access. Thereare a few steps in the successful implementation of a CR cycle. Namely,spectrum awareness (achieved through sensing various spectrum parameters andspectrum occupancy), analysis and decision making based on the observation, andspectrum exploitation (adaptation). These basic functions need to be carriedout repeatedly in a cognitive radio network. Another challenge in WSN is providing energy.Battery management and maintenance of these sensors can be a prohibitivelyexpensive exercise because of their abundance. Sensors performance willdeteriorate with the remaining energy level and dead sensor nodes will affectthe performance of an entire network, especially in multi-hop networks.Improper battery disposal will also cause environmental pollution and healthhazardous in the long run. The energy issue can be alleviated by energyharvesting. The ambience has energy in the forms of light, heat, mechanicalvibrations and electromagnetic radiations. Especially, cognitive WSN can harvestenergy from the primary network. This energy has to be collected withappropriate transducers, stored reliably and used for wireless datatransmission which is typically bursty. The sporadic and unreliable nature ofthe energy harvesting process as well as characteristics of electronic elementshas to be appropriately modeled t