In this paper we design a cognitive access scheme for WSNs that coexist with WLANs, considering the problem of blind and hidden WLAN terminals. The cognitive access scheme relies on a-priory known WLAN idle time distribution functions and repeated channel measurements to optimize the size of the transmitted data unit and the transmission distance, such that the normalized transmission energy is minimized. We compare the proposed scheme with simple carrier sensing and random access solutions and show that the energy gain is significant under typical WLAN utilization values.
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