In cognitive radio (CR) systems with distributed spectrum sensing, spatially distributed sensors perform radio frequency (RF) sensing and forward the result to the CR. Such approach yields robust and reliable spectrum sensing to discover spectrum opportunity. The overall system performance depends both on the quality of sensing at the individual sensors and the forwarding scheme from the sensors to the CR. In this aspect the choice of appropriate media access (MAC) control plays significant role. In this paper we propose cross layer approach to yield a high performance distributed spectrum sensing scheme. The idea is based on exploiting idle waiting times to capture more signal energy. To demonstrate our idea, we provide computer simulation by considering energy detection based distributed spectrum sensors and some of the 802.15.4 MAC specification assumptions.