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Spectrum Sharing, Cognitive Radio, Throughput, Licensed Users, Secondary Users.

The throughput performance of secondary users sharing radio spectrum with a licensed primary user is analyzed in this work. An asynchronous transmission, sensing and backoff protocol is proposed for the secondary user and modeled as a six state Markov process. The model parameters are derived as a function of the duty cycle and average duration that the channel is unoccupied by the primary user. The secondary user parameters include its continuous transmission duration or packet size and its backoff window size. The model results show that the probabilities of the secondary user being in the transmit state are relatively invariant to the duty cycle compared to the probability of being in the backoff state, particularly at low to moderate secondary packet sizes. The secondary user throughput is expressed as a function of the aforementioned parameters and shown to change significantly with duty cycle and secondary packet sizes. It is found that at very low duty cycles, the throughput variation is insensitive to backoff duration being random or fixed. The proposed transmission and sensing method is also shown to outperform a periodic sensing protocol. The regions of the parameter space wherein the backoff and retransmit probabilities of the secondary user are bounded by specified performance metrics are derived. The sensitivity of the throughput in the presence of a cooperative and non- cooperative secondary user is also investigated.