Throughput-delay analysis of a multichannel wireless access protocol

In this paper, we analyze the effect of bursty packet losses, caused by a correlation in the multipath fading process, on the throughput and delay performance of a multichannel wireless access protocol. M equal-capacity, orthogonal, traffic channels are shared by N mobile users (N/spl ges/M) on the uplink (mobile-to-base station link). Transmission attempts on the uplink are made based on the busy/idle status of the M receivers, which is broadcast by the base station, in every slot, on the downlink (base station-to-mobile link). Following a Markov chain analysis, we derive the analytical expressions for the average per channel throughput and the mean message transfer delay. Simulation results are shown to verify the analysis. We compare the effect of Doppler bandwidth on the performance of both the basic protocol without link layer error recovery and a modified version of the protocol that employs a "persist-until-success" link layer retransmission strategy to recover erroneous data packets.