Smart ARQ Report Strategy (SARS) for the IEEE 802.16e Wireless Metropolitan Network

The mobile wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN) architecture imposes a demanding reliable transmission requirement on both base station and mobile station to provide continuously bi-directional services. The transmitter will functionally allocate a buffer for outbound traffic, and thus naturally provide reliable transmission by using the acknowledgement scheme and the automatic repeat request (ARQ) mechanism. The IEEE 802.16 standard supports four report types for a receiver to adaptively report the binary reception status of the received ARQ block to the transmitter in the more efficient way. However, the standard does not recommend the strategy for selecting the most appropriate report type for certain report content, as using an improper report type will render more message overhead and cause long packet reception delay. As a solution, we propose a new strategy, namely smart ARQ report strategy (SARS), which evaluates the efficiency of each report type on encoding the binary report content to select the best report type with the minimal signal overhead and maximal report capability. Simulation results reveal that SARS can achieve significant overhead reduction as well as better response time than the strategy using single report type.