On the packet radio multicast scheme for the personal communications era

This paper deals with the point to multi-point packet radio data communication scheme with error control (ARQ; automatic repeat request). The author calls this scheme multicast ARQ. A general concept of the total idle time in receiving data from each receiver is introduced. Occasionally, data link duality may be vastly different between the receivers. In such a case, normally linked receivers may be obliged to wait in an idle state during the period that the poorly linked receivers are recovering the error packet. A performance measure for the multicast ARQ is discussed, the minimization of the idle time is examined, and a variety of multicast ARQ schemes are numerically compared