Majority decoded automatic repeat request error control schemes

Abstract

The authors propose a simple method to improve the performance of automatic repeat request (ARQ) error control. To minimize the hardware and software overhead they do not use a sophisticated coding method. Instead, when a transmission error occurs, the erroneous packet, instead of being discarded as in traditional ARQ, is kept for majority decoding later. The authors apply the method to various ARQs, including ideal selective-repeat and go-back-N under point-to-point and point-to-multipoint communication environments. They also study the effect of transmitting multiple copies of a packet. The analysis shows that higher throughput is obtained when bit error rate is high or when the number of receivers is large.