A queuing analysis of packet dropping for real-time applications in wireless networks

In this paper, we consider a multimedia data transmission system over a wireless channel, where packets are queued at the transmitter. Multimedia data transmission over wireless networks often suffers from delay, jitter and packet loss. The main problem to implement a wireless network is the high and variable bit error rate in the radio link (fading, shadowing etc), making it necessary to use an additional error control mechanism. Among the most important performance measures for real time applications are the packet loss probability and expected delay. In order to improve the radio link, one often retransmits packets that have not been well received (using the Automatic Retransmission reQuest - ARQ). This however may lead to queuing phenomena and increased delay due to retransmissions, and to losses of packets due to buffer overflow. In this paper, we assume that the number of retransmission is finite. We present a queuing analysis which based on matrix-geometric solutions in M/G/1 type Markov chains, in order to compute some performance measures of interest.