Throughput performance of an adaptive ARQ scheme in Rayleigh fading channels

Using a simulation study we analyze the throughput performance of Yao´s adaptive ARQ scheme in time-varying channels. The simulation takes into account the Rayleigh amplitude and the fast or the slow fading characteristics of a wireless channel, under a representative M-FSK modulation and Reed-Solomon coding scheme. We show that, for a specific set of design parameters, Yao´s adaptive procedure works well for all channel fading rates, except for moderately slow rates. By observing variations of packet error rates at a specified SNR we provide an explanation for these varied behaviors under different channel fading rates.