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Traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs) work over the unlicensed spectrum, and as the spectrum becomes increasingly crowded, they suffer from uncontrolled interference. Recently, cognitive radio based sensor networks (CRSNs) have been envisioned as a promising type of implementation that provides quality-of-service (QoS) features for data transmissions. However, key challenges remain in designing energy-efficient medium access control techniques that can achieve QoS. In this paper, we have developed a multiconstrained QoS aware MAC protocol, MQ-MAC, for a cluster based CRSN. In MQ-MAC, a data channel and a backup channel are assigned to a secondary user by the respective cluster head by using dynamic channel priorities. The user device can switch to the backup channel when a primary user appears to be operating over the data channel. Member nodes of a cluster are also prioritized …