Detecting spectrum holes and efficiently accessing them are the two basic functions that enable acognitive radio (CR) to make use of the licensed spectrums of a primary radio (PR). In this paper, we consider a CR scheme, which opportunistically accesses a PR channel for communication between a pair of nodes based on the stop-and-wait hybrid automatic repeat request (SW-HARQ). Hence, it is referred to as the cognitive SW-HARQ (CSW-HARQ) arrangement.
In our CSW-HARQ system, the PR channel is modelled as a two-state Markov chain having `On’ and `Off’ states. The CR may only access the PR channel in its `Off’ state. In this paper, we analyze both the throughput and delay performance of the CSW-HARQ system, for which a range of closed-form formulas are derived that are also validated by simulation results. Our performance results show that both the activities of PR users and the reliability of the CR channel have a substantial impact on the achievable performance of the CR system.