Cognitive Radio-Aware Transport Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

With the proliferation of new wireless service, scarce wireless resources is expected to become a critical issue. For this reason, cognitive radio mobile ad hoc networks (CogMANET) are being developed as a promising solution to this problem. However, in CogMANET, channel switching is inherently necessary whenever a primary user with a license appears on the channel. Allowing secondary users to choose an available channel from among a wide spectrum range thus enables reliable communication in this context, but communication characteristics such as bottleneck bandwidth and RTT will change with channel switch. In response to this change, TCP has to adaptively update its congestion window (cwnd) to make an efficient use of the available resources. For this purpose, TCP CRAHN was proposed for CogMANET. In this paper, TCP CRAHN is first evaluated in cases where bottleneck bandwidth and RTT drastically change. Based on these results, TCP CoBA is proposed to further improve the throughput of the above use cases. TCP CoBA updates the cwnd based upon the available buffer space in the relay node upon channel switch, as well as other communication characteristics. Through simulations, we show that compared with TCP CRAHN, TCP CoBA improves the throughput by up to 200 percent

Efficient spectrum-handoff schemes for cognitive radio networks

Radio spectrum access is important for terrestrial wireless networks, commercial earth observations and terrestrial radio astronomy observations. The services offered by terrestrial wireless networks, commercial earth observations and terrestrial radio astronomy observations have evolved due to technological advances. They are expected to meet increasing users' demands which will require more spectrum. The increasing demand for high throughput by users necessitates allocating additional spectrum to terrestrial wireless networks. Terrestrial radio astronomy observations s require additional bandwidth to observe more spectral windows. Commercial earth observation requires more spectrum for enhanced transmission of earth observation data. The evolution of terrestrial wireless networks, commercial earth observations and terrestrial radio astronomy observations leads to the emergence of new interference scenarios. For instance, terrestrial wireless networks pose interference risks to mobile ground stations; while inter-satellite links can interfere with terrestrial radio astronomy observations. Terrestrial wireless networks, commercial earth observations and terrestrial radio astronomy observations also require mechanisms that will enhance the performance of their users. This thesis proposes a framework that prevents interference between terrestrial wireless networks, commercial earth observations and terrestrial radio astronomy observations when they co-exist; and enhance the performance of their users. The framework uses the cognitive radio; because it is capable of multi-context operation. In the thesis, two interference avoidance mechanisms are presented. The first mechanism prevents interference between terrestrial radio astronomy observations and inter-satellite links. The second mechanism prevent interference between terrestrial wireless networks and the commercial earth observation ground segment. The first interference reductionmechanism determines the inter-satellite link transmission duration. Analysis shows that interference-free inter-satellite links transmission is achievable during terrestrial radio astronomy observation switching for up to 50.7 seconds. The second mechanism enables the mobile ground station, with a trained neural network, to predict the terrestrial wireless network channel idle state. The prediction of the TWN channel idle state prevents interference between the terrestrial wireless network and the mobile ground station. Simulation shows that incorporating prediction in the mobile ground station enhances uplink throughput by 40.6% and reduces latency by 18.6%. In addition, the thesis also presents mechanisms to enhance the performance of the users in terrestrial wireless network, commercial earth observations and terrestrial radio astronomy observations. The thesis presents mechanisms that enhance user performance in homogeneous and heterogeneous terrestrial wireless networks. Mechanisms that enhance the performance of LTE-Advanced users with learning diversity are also presented. Furthermore, a future commercial earth observation network model that increases the accessible earth climatic data is presented. The performance of terrestrial radio astronomy observation users is enhanced by presenting mechanisms that improve angular resolution, power efficiency and reduce infrastructure costs