Tuning radio resource in an overlay cognitive radio network for TCP: Greed isn't good

In this article we illustrate the performance of Transmission Control Protocol in an overlay cognitive radio network under dynamic spectrum access. We show that the performance of TCP in overlay CR networks that implement DSA to be quite different from its performance in conventional networks, which do not allow DSA. The key difference is that secondary users in an overlay CR network have to cope with a new type of loss called service interruption loss, due to the existence of primary users. We demonstrate on an NS2 simulation testbed the surprising result: Excessive radio resource usage leads to a decrease in aggregate TCP throughput. This behavior is in contrast to the behavior of TCP in conventional networks, where throughput increases monotonically with the available radio resource.