Traffic management is a highly beneficial mechanism for satisfying quality‐of‐service requirements and overcoming the resource scarcity problems in networks. This paper introduces an optimal connection admission control mechanism to decrease the packet loss ratio and end‐to‐end delay in cognitive radio sensor networks (CRSNs). This mechanism admits data flows based on the value of information sent by the sensor nodes, the network state, and the estimated required resources of the data flows. The number of required channels of each data flow is estimated using a proposed formula that is inspired by a graph coloring approach. The proposed admission control mechanism is formulated as a semi‐Markov decision process and a linear programming problem is derived to obtain the optimal admission control policy for obtaining the maximum reward. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism outperforms a recently proposed admission control mechanism in CRSNs.