Error control mechanisms over correlated fading channels

The paper considers the application of forward error correction (FEC) and automatic repeat request (ARQ) schemes over correlated wireless channels. In particular, the depth of the interleaver and its influence on the frame-error-rate and transmission delay in the presence of correlated fading and delay constraints is investigated. It is found that an increased interleaver depth in a correlated channel, although improving the bit-error-rate, does not always improve the frame-error-rate (FER). Further, it is shown that, in the case of bursty channels, a large interleaver depth is required to improve the FER, thus negatively influencing the delay. In this case, the use of a retransmission scheme can improve delay performance.