Adaptive Go-Back-N ARQ Protocol over Two Parallel Channels with Slow State Transition

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an adaptive Go-Back-N (GBN) ARQ protocol over two parallel channels with slow state transition. This proposed protocol sophisticatedly determines the order of priority of the channel usage for sending packets, by using the channel-state feedback information. We exactly analyze the throughput efficiency of the protocol and obtain its closed-form expression under the assumption that the time-varying channel is modeled by a two-state Markov chain, which is characterized by packet error rate and the decay factor. The analytical results and numerical examples show that, for a given round-trip time, the throughput efficiency depends on both the average packet-error rate and the decay factor. Furthermore, it is shown that the throughput efficiency of the proposed protocol is superior to that of the non-adaptive Go-Back-N protocol using the two channels in a fixed order in the case of slow state transition (i.e. the decay factor is positively large).