Frequency-hop packet radio networks with coding and retransmission backoff

A fully connected frequency-hop packet radio network is considered. Four packet-combining techniques are presented, which significantly reduce the packet-error rate. An analytical model is used to offer insight into how system dynamics are affected by the error-control method and retransmission backoff policy. It is shown that enhancing the error-control method increases the maximum throughput of the network and alleviates the stability problem, but does not solve the problem. On the other hand, a good choice of retransmission backoff policy solves the stability problem, but does not alter the maximum throughput. These results suggest that in order to construct a stable network with large throughput, a good error-control method and retransmission backoff policy are both necessary.