Performance analysis of single source and single relay cooperative ARQ protocols under time correlated Rayleigh fading channel

In this paper, we analyze the performance of a cooperative Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) protocol under Poisson arrivals and time correlated Rayleigh fading. The conventional non-cooperative ARQ protocol under the same channel environment is also analyzed to compare its performance with that of the cooperative ARQ protocol. A two-dimensional discrete time Markov chain is constructed for the analysis. Using the steady state analysis of the Markov chain, the average frame latency and the probability generating function of the frame service time are derived. We validate our analytical results by comparing them with simulation results. From our analysis, we show that the cooperative ARQ protocol outperforms the non-cooperative ARQ protocol and the effect of the time correlation in the fading channel is not negligible. We also see that the performance metrics which we consider in this paper are almost constant as long as d S R 2 + d R D 2 remains constant, where d S R is the distance between the source node and the relay node and d R D is the distance between the relay node and the destination node.