Performance of a hybrid multilevel error control with an early-stop ARQ protocol for wireless ATM networks

This paper proposes an effective hybrid multilevel error control (HMEC) with an early-stop automatic repeat request (ARQ) scheme for wireless asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. In this scheme, the source traffic is segmented into a number of blocks, each with m cells, then encoded into k(k>m) cells. The transmission of one block may be finished as long as m out of the k cells are received correctly. The ARQ protocol is applied only when too many cells are dropped or corrupted due to uncorrectable error in the radio channel. This paper also provides a detail study of the proposed scheme. In particular, the throughput efficiency with parameters (m,k) are derived analytically for the white Gaussian and Rayleigh fading channels. Simulation results show a very close match with theoretical results. All the results show that the HMEC scheme can reduce cell-retransmission probability and improve network throughput over a wide range of channel error rates when appropriate values of parameters m and k are chosen.