Performance analysis of multichannel wireless access protocol in the presence of bursty packet losses

We analyze the effect of bursty packet losses caused by correlation in the multipath fading process on the throughput and delay performance of a multichannel wireless access protocol. We model the channel memory as a first-order Markov chain whose parameters are defined as a function of the fading margin and the normalized Doppler bandwidth. Following a Markov chain analysis, we derive the analytical expressions for the average per channel throughput and the mean message transfer delay. It is shown that the multichannel protocol with a 'persist-until-success' retransmission strategy at the link level to recover erroneous data packets performs better on fast fading channels (low correlation), whereas the protocol without retransmission at the link level performs better on slow fading channels (high correlation).