Transport Protocols in Cognitive Radio Networks: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews the current transport protocols designed for cognitive radio networks, highlighting their unique challenges and comparing existing solutions to improve reliable communication amid spectrum uncertainty.

Contribution

It is the first comprehensive survey focusing on transport protocols in CRNs, detailing their challenges, features, and open research issues.

Findings

Identifies key challenges in CRN transport protocols

Provides a comparative analysis of existing protocols

Discusses open issues and future research directions

Abstract

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) have emerged as a promising solution to enhance spectrum utilization by using unused or less used spectrum in radio environments. The basic idea of CRNs is to allow secondary users (SUs) access to licensed spectrum, under the condition that the interference perceived by the primary users (PUs) is minimal. In CRNs, the channel availability is uncertainty due to the existence of PUs, resulting in intermittent communication. Transmission control protocol (TCP) performance may significantly degrade in such conditions. To address the challenges, some transport protocols have been proposed for reliable transmission in CRNs. In this paper we survey the state-of-the-art transport protocols for CRNs. We firstly highlight the unique aspects of CRNs, and describe the challenges of transport protocols in terms of PU behavior, spectrum sensing, spectrum changing and TCP mechanism itself over CRNs. Then, we provide a summary and comparison of existing transport protocols for CRNs. Finally, we discuss several open issues and research challenges. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first survey on transport protocols for CRNs.