Cross-Layer Design for Energy Efficiency of TCP Traffic in Cognitive Radio Networks

In cognitive radio (CR) networks, cross-layer design is an important issue since the behavior of one protocol could affect the performance of others. However, for the energy-constraint CR networks, the previous works mostly focus on maximizing the throughput in physical or transport layer, rather than the energy efficiency of the end-to-end transmission control protocol (TCP). In this paper, we propose a novel cross-layer scheme which takes the lower layers´ parameters into consideration, e.g., signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), modulation and frame size, to improve the energy efficiency of TCP. Specifically, we use a finite state Markov channel (FSMC) model to characterize the fading channel, and solve the optimization problem by a restless bandit approach. Simulation results show that the physical and data link layer parameters affect the energy efficiency of the TCP traffic significantly and the performance can be improved by the adjustment of lower layers´ parameters compared with the existing method.