The inefficient assignment of spectrum for different communications purposes, plus technology enhancements and ever-increasing usage of wireless technology is causing spectrum scarcity. To address this issue, one of the proposed solutions in the literature is to access the spectrum dynamically or opportunistically. Therefore, the concept of cognitive radio appeared, which opens up a new research paradigm. There is extensive research on the physical, medium access control and network layers. The impact of the transport layer on the performance of cognitive radio ad hoc sensor networks is still unknown/unexplored. The Internet's de facto transport protocol is not well suited to wireless networks because of its congestion control mechanism. We propose an opportunistic hybrid transport protocol for cognitive radio ad hoc sensor networks. We developed a new congestion control mechanism to differentiate true congestion from interruption loss. After such detection and differentiation, we propose methods to handle them opportunistically. There are several benefits to window- and rate-based protocols. To exploit the benefits of both in order to enhance overall system performance, we propose a hybrid transport protocol. We empirically calculate the optimal threshold value to switch between window- and rate-based mechanisms. We then compare our proposed transport protocol to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)-friendly rate control, TCP-friendly rate control for cognitive radio, and TCP-friendly window-based control. We ran an extensive set of simulations in Network Simulator 2. The results indicate that the proposed transport protocol performs better than all the others.
Keywords: cognitive radio ad hoc sensor network; congestion control; opportunistic; transport protocol.