A selective-repeat ARQ scheme and its throughput analysis

A selective-repeat ARQ (automatic repeat request) scheme that uses a finite receiver buffer is investigated. A Markov process is identified which describes the proposed ARQ scheme with a receiver buffer of size N. It leads to an irreducible, aperiodic, finite, and stationary Markov chain. The resulting stationary probability distribution is then used to compute exactly the throughput efficiency. Analytical results show that the proposed protocol significantly outperforms the go-back-N ARQ protocol and its variations over a wide range of channel capacities and bit error rates.