Rate-adaptive transmission over correlated fading channels

In this paper, we investigate link adaptation and incremental redundancy (IR) retransmission schemes over correlated wireless channels. While computer simulations have been used to study the performance of these techniques, a numerically tractable analytical approach is more desirable to analyze generic protocols, and to reveal insights into the performance tradeoffs. An error-recursion approach is developed in this paper to mathematically analyze the throughput, delay, and energy efficiency of rate-adaptation techniques over fading channels with arbitrary correlations between retransmissions. Using Reed-Solomon codes as an example, we quantitatively predict the performance tradeoff of throughput and latency for IR schemes and the performance dependency on the channel correlation. Numerical results also show that reactive rate-adaptation schemes with IR retransmission outperform proactive rate-adaptive schemes, even with perfect channel side information, in terms of throughput and energy efficiency.