Analysis of TCP throughput in cognitive radio networks

In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), the performance of transmission control protocol (TCP) of the secondary user (SU) is drastically influenced by the primary users´ activities and the imperfect spectrum sensing. This is because not only the channel unavailability, sensing overhead and sensing errors, but also the strong interaction between TCP and the lower layers will lead to the reduction of the data transmission time. In this paper, we analyze the TCP throughput by taking into account all the causes of the reduction of the data transmission time, and then propose a TCP throughput model for CRNs. By simulation, we verify that our proposed TCP throughput model is more accurate than the conventional ones.