Optimising TCP over cognitive radio networks for trains

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a very popular transport protocol used by the majority of applications. However TCP is inefficient when used over mobile networks. Moreover mobile networks technology is moving towards a new emerging paradigm called Cognitive Radio (CR). Cognitive Radio brings its own share of problems for TCP however more importantly it brings the capability to gather more knowledge about its radio environment. TCP will face same problems, if not more, when used over mobile networks enabled with CR technology. However, these new CR capabilities open the door for better cross layer TCP optimisation techniques. This paper proposes a cross layer distributed mechanism using CR triggers and freeze TCP to optimise TCP over cognitive radio networks for trains. The results show that our mechanism can improve the link utilisation efficiency as compared to standard TCP.