A go-back-N protocol with multicopy retransmission for high speed satellite communications

This paper presents and analyses a GB(N) ARQ protocol that requires equal size buffer length in the transmitter and receiver. The recovery strategy uses the idea of multicopy retransmissions. It avoids buffer overflows, reduces the effect of the round trip delay and performs well in high speed satellite environments. The analysis uses a semi-Markov process model and includes a parameter in order to obtain the throughput as a function of the number of erroneous messages that may be processed and reordered during the recovery procedure. Numerical results show that the proposed strategy presents better performance than all the other known GB(N) schemes. Furthermore, the throughput efficiency remains in an usable range even for very high error rate conditions where it outperforms some finite buffer selective repeat schemes