Performance analysis of frequency-hop packet radio networks with generalized retransmission backoff

A fully connected radio network is considered in which packets are sent using Reed-Solomon error-control coding, slow frequency-hop (FH) modulation, and generalized retransmission backoff policy. An easy-to-use analytical method for finite population FH networks is developed which offers insight into how system dynamics is affected by the number of users and the input rate. The performance of several retransmission backoff policies is examined. It is shown that the performance of exponential backoff policy with small minimum retransmission probability is not too far away from the optimum, when the code-block length is small and the number of users is not unreasonably large. It is also shown that packet rejection after a certain number of unsuccessful transmissions can stabilize some networks as one would expect, but may destabilize some others contrarily. Finally, the accuracy of the method is verified by extensive simulation results.