Performance of the burst-level ARQ error protection scheme in an indoor mobile radio environment

Burst-level ARQ, a new error protection scheme for speech transmission, is based on ARE (automatic repeat request) which is used on burst level, i.e., only the erroneous bursts are repeated. It is more flexible than a conventional error protection based on forward error correction (FEC) because the redundancy is sent only when required. Furthermore, with a limited number of retransmissions, it provides a low delay. The performance of the burst-level ARQ is studied by computer simulations in an indoor environment and compared with conventional FEC schemes using convolutional codes and interleaving. The cellular capacity of both schemes is calculated taking into account the required carrier capacity (i.e., the number of slots per TDMA frame) as web as the frequency reuse efficiency (i.e., the robustness to co-channel interference). The burst level ARQ is shown to be a good solution when low delay and high performance is required