Performance of Transport Control Protocol Over Dynamic Spectrum Access Links

Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) radio devices look for temporarily unoccupied frequency bands and attempt to communicate in them. It is envisioned that DSA can substantially increase the capacity of wireless networks by broadening the utilization of radio resources. Given the ubiquitous use of Internet's Transport Control Protocol (TCP), it can be expected that TCP will be used in DSA networks in the future. Whether TCP can efficiently provide stable end-to-end transmissions over DSA links, given their dynamic and unpredictable nature, remained unclear. Therefore, we have studied by simulation the ability of various TCP flavors to efficiently utilize DSA links. We have performed simulations using the TCP stack from the Linux operating system. Our simulations show that modern TCPs can efficiently make use of the dynamic capacity of DSA links for bulk data transmission, under a wide range of conditions, but only if certain requirements are met. We also analytically determine the effect of Primary User (PU) detection errors on TCP performance and conclude that the dominating component responsible for TCP throughput reduction in a DSA environment is the observation time, not, as one might expect, PU detection errors.