On the Performance of Transport Control Protocol in Cognitive Radio Networks

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the most commonly used transport protocol on the Internet. All indications assure that it will be an integral part of the future Internetworks. In this chapter, the authors present how regular TCP, which was designed for wired networks, is not suitable for dynamic spectrum access networks. They develop an analytical model to estimate the TCP throughput of dynamic spectrum access networks. Dynamic spectrum access networks deal with opportunistic spectrum access leading to greater utilization of the spectrum. The extent of utilization depends on the primary user's traffic and also on the way the spectrum is accessed by the primary and secondary users. The proposed model considers primary and secondary user traffic in estimating the TCP throughput by modeling the spectrum access using continuous-time Markov chains, thus providing more insight on effect of dynamic spectrum access on TCP performance than the existing models.