A transparent ARQ scheme for broadband wireless access

In this paper, we propose an automatic repeat request (ARQ) technique for enhancing the reliability and throughput of broadband wireless Internet access applications, and provide examples of its performance. ARQ is a method for making a link and flow more robust to errors. Other than enhancing link quality, ARQ provides early error recovery, so that the transport layer does not lower the data throughput. The cost of these enhancements is additional overhead. In this work, we have extensively analyzed our proposed ARQ scheme along with realistic wireless channel and protocol stack models. We have quantified the performance gains of our ARQ scheme as reduced end-to-end delay, increased throughput, SNR gain and fade margin, also providing the overhead costs. We have proposed and analyzed enhanced features namely, segmentation and reassembly (SAR) and bitmap compression. We showed that these features reduce the overhead, the extent of which depends on the nature of the errors.