Performance computation of cross-layer Hybrid ARQ schemes at IP layer in the presence of corrupted acknowledgments

Hybrid ARQ (HARQ) schemes operate at the PHY and Medium Access (MAC) layers and their performance have been naturally studied at the MAC level. However, all the modern systems are going to be running under the IP protocol. Therefore, in order to get realistic performance of the whole system considering the multiple layer stacks, performance analysis at the IP layer is crucial. Very little work has been done so far in this direction, except in [2] which studies the delay statistics of IP packets with Selective-Repeat ARQ, and [1] which proposes a cross-layer optimization strategy between MAC and IP layers for ARQ, and in [8], [9] which consider the HARQ case. In this paper, we study the effect of erroneous feedbacks at the MAC layer on the performance at the IP layer considering both conventional HARQ schemes as well as the cross-layer strategy mentioned above. We derive in closed-form expressions the performance in terms of packet error rate (PER), efficiency, and delay with respect to the error probability of the feedback channel.