Int. J. Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2014
Sheng-Shih Wang*, Pei-Chun Lee, Kan-Yen Lin
and Tzu-Chang Yeh
Abstract: To provide reliable communications in wireless environments, two fundamental error
control mechanisms, automatic repeat request (ARQ) and forward error correction (FEC) are
proposed. However, the ARQ mechanism may suffer frequent retransmissions and the FEC
mechanism incurs bandwidth overhead. To reduce the number of retransmissions and support
efficient correction, previous studies have proposed numerous packet combining based error recovery
schemes. This study investigates the recovery performance of three packet combining based error
recovery schemes, including the extended ARQ (EARQ), the merge strategy in the simple packet
combining (SPaC-M), and the destination packet (DPC) schemes through the mathematical analysis
and simulations. Results present that the EARQ outperforms the SPaC-M and the DPC in recovery
speed in case of a large packet length and a high bit error rate. However, the EARQ is not suggested
if the space overhead is the major consideration.
Keywords: packet combining; error recovery; ARQ; automatic repeat request; FEC; forward error
correction.