Efficiency of error-control schemes for real-time wireless applications on the Gilbert channel

The design of a bandwidth-efficient physical layer for wireless access has always been a challenging task, due to the harsh environment, characterized by impairing phenomena such as radio interference, fading, and shadowing. With circuit switching, a bit-error rate suitable for real-time applications such as voice and video is guaranteed by adopting robust forward error correction (FEC) codes and proper power-budget margins to face fading problems. With this approach, automatic repeat request (ARQ) is used only for applications that require a much lower error rate and can tolerate high delays. The introduction of the packet technique allows the use of ARQ even for real-time traffic. We compare the efficiency of three error-recovering techniques in the presence of traffic with delay constraints, when the memory property of the wireless segment is represented by the Gilbert-Elliot channel. The techniques compared are FEC with interleaving, real-time ARQ, and erasure coding (EC). The comparisons are performed by using both analytical and simulation tools. Two new analytical models are introduced to evaluate the performance of FEC and EC. Simulation is used to validate the analytical results and to derive the performance of real-time ARQ. The numerical results show that when the channel memory increases well beyond the packet-transmission time, the performance of FEC impairs due to the limited interleaving depth, while ARQ and EC remain effective.