Performance analysis of VoIP services in mobile WiMAX systems with a hybrid ARQ scheme

This paper analyzes the performance of voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) services in terms of the system throughput, the packet delay, and the signaling overhead in a mobile WiMAX system with a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) mechanism. Furthermore, a queueing analytical model is developed with due consideration of adaptive modulation and coding, the signaling overhead, and the retransmissions of erroneous packets. The arrival process is modeled as the sum of the arrival rate at the initial transmission queue and the retransmission queue, respectively. The service rate is calculated by taking the HARQ retransmissions into consideration. This paper also evaluates the performance of VoIP services in a mobile WiMAX system with and without persistent allocation; persistent allocation is a technique used to reduce the signaling overhead for connections with a periodic traffic pattern and a relatively fixed payload. As shown in the simulation results, the HARQ mechanism increases the system throughput as well as the signaling overhead and the packet delay.