In this paper, a new clear channel assessment (CCA) method: cascaded-CCA, is proposed. The primary motivation for the proposed approach is to integrate the respective advantages of two standard CCA mechanisms, energy detect and preamble detect, to arrive at a new dual threshold CCA family that can provide greater flexibility towards tuning MAC performance. Cascaded-CCA integrates energy efficiency of the energy detector (ED) and the reliability of the preamble detector (PD). The probability of detection/false alarm and power consumption of cascaded-CCA in the CCA modules of IEEE 802.11b are analyzed and compared with ED and PD as an example. The performance of cascaded-CCA is explored via MATLAB simulations that implement the CCA modules and medium access control (MAC) protocol for IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4. Simulation results showed that cascaded-CCA improves the energy efficiency significantly compared to ED-only or PD-only CCA. In addition, ED, PD, and cascaded CCA are applied to a cognitive network scenario to validate the effectiveness of the proposed cascaded-CCA.