Improving Wireless TCP Throughput by a Novel TCM-Based Hybrid ARQ

A novel hybrid ARQ (HARQ) scheme using a concatenated two-state trellis-coded modulation (CT-TCM) code is proposed for improving wireless TCP throughput. A distinguished feature of the proposed scheme is that the heavily punctured TCM codes are used for retransmissions of the corrupted data block, which are combined at the receiver with the previously received sequences of the same data block for decoding. By this method, significantly improved coding gain and efficient spectrum utilization can be achieved with very low complexity. A Markov model is developed to evaluate TCP throughput over the proposed HARQ in wireless link. By both analysis and simulation, we demonstrate that compared with other existing TCM-based ARQ schemes, significant improvement of TCP throughput over wireless links is achieved by the proposed CT-TCM HARQ while smaller buffer size is required at the access point.