Performance analysis of a type II hybrid ARQ protocol based on RCPC codes for the IEEE802.11a random access MAC protocol

ARQ protocols combined with incremental redundancy coding are a promising technique to improve the performance of wireless communication systems. The key idea is the increment of the FEC protection at each retransmission, transmitting in an incremental fashion the parity bits previously punctured from a low rate mother code. This paper explores the use of RCPC codes with incremental redundancy to enhance the performance of the IEEE802.11a wireless LAN random access MAC protocol. The proposed approach improves the throughput of the IEEE802.11a defined PHY/MAC modes due to a reduction on the number of retransmissions and the number of bits transmitted at each retransmission. We also discuss several considerations that have to be made to analyze the performance of these hybrid PHY/MAC techniques in a multiuser scenario.