Opportunistic secondary spectrum sharing protocols for primary implementing an IR type Hybrid-ARQ protocol

In this paper, we propose, analyse and compare three different methods for opportunistic spectrum sharing access when the primary users implements an Incremental Redundancy (IR) type Hybrid Automatic ReQuest (H-ARQ) protocol. The first method consists in allowing the secondary user to communicate only during the first primary transmission round of the IR H-ARQ protocol. In this scenario, if the the secondary receiver fails to decode its message after the first round, it realizes a successive interference cancellation in the subsequent primary HARQ rounds by listening to the primary user. The second method consists in realizing a perfect interference cancellation at the secondary receiver with causal channel state information. In this method, the secondary user communicates only when the secondary receiver succeeds in decoding the primary message. To improve throughput performance at the secondary, the secondary pair is also considering the use of an IR-HARQ protocol. In a third method, the secondary user communicates following the same rule as in the proposed second method, but implementing an Adaptive Modulation and Coding scheme instead of HARQ. In particular, we show that this last protocol with a small number of interfered slots allows to limit the loss in the primary throughput needed for the secondary user to transmit.