The main objective of cognitive radio network is to provide flexible spectrum management, by permitting the secondary users (SUs) to temporarily access the licensed spectrum in the absence of a primary user. In the existing backward induction approach, each SU performs spectrum sensing and consequently reports the sensing details to the centralized controller. In the proposed work, an adaptive cluster-based heuristic approach (ACBHA) with cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) scheme has been proposed for cognitive radio medium access control networks for 5G applications. To identify the availability of unused spectrum, the proposed CSS-based ACBHA algorithm adopts a cluster-based selection scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed CSS-based ACBHA provides a better result compared with existing techniques. The performance parameters such as false alarm probability, the probability of detection, spectrum sensing time, slot length, noise density have been analyzed using MATLAB R2012a.