An Enhanced TCP for Optimizing Channel Utilization in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks

Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) network grows rapidly in recent years. It is proposed to solve the problem of reasonable utilization of wireless spectrum resources. DSA is a new spectrum sharing paradigm which takes advantage of spectrum holes to ease the spectrum shortage problem and improve the spectrum utilization. However, due to the frequent spectrum switch, the performance of TCP will degrade greatly in the DSA network, and thus the channel is unutilized. To tackle with this problem and improve high throughput performance, this paper proposes a protocol called TCP WSP based on the assumption that there will be a Wide Stationary Process (WSP) between two spectrum switches. Then the authors propose a mechanism to predict the spectrum switch and adjust the sending rate of TCP based on the prediction to optimize channel utilization in DSA networks. They implement our mechanism on NS2 simulator, and the results show that their mechanism can achieve high throughput performance.