Design and Performance Analysis of an ARQ Scheme for Broadband Wireless Access

Abstract

This paper presents design and analysis of an Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) scheme for enhancing the throughput and reliability of broadband wireless access systems. The impact of ARQ is emphasized in terms of early error recovery, when Internet data applications and the TCP protocol are considered over a point-to-multipoint fixed wireless system. A selective repeat type ARQ scheme is designed and analyzed through extensive, realistic modeling and simulation of the entire network protocol stack and the wireless channel. The system-wide impact of ARQ design is quantified in terms of end-to-end delay, throughput and SNR gain and in all these metrics, significant performance improvement is observed. Enhanced features, namely, Segmentation and Reassembly (SAR) and Bitmap Compression, are proposed and shown to reduce the overhead costs.