THROUGHPUT ESTIMATION OF ARQ PROTOCOLS FOR A RAYLEIGH FADING CHANNEL USING FADE-DURATION AND INTERFADE-DURATION STATISTICS

Error detection combined with automatic repeat request (ARQ) retransmission can provide reliable digital data transmission over a communication channel. In this paper, the throughput for a system using Go-Back-N or Selective-Repeat protocols with Rayleigh fading in both directions of transmission has been approximated by using fade- and interfade-duration statistics of a multipath channel. Results indicate that for a slow fading channel (e.g. fading rate = 1.34 Hz), the through-put of Go-Back-N is only slightly inferior to that of Selective-Repeat. This is mainly due to the burstiness of the channel bit errors.