ARQ error control for delay-constrained communications on short-range burst-error channels

We study the performance of a simple ARQ error control strategy for delay-constrained data communications over a bursty channel in the presence of instantaneous feedback. Correlated errors are modeled as a Markov process whose parameters are directly related to physical layer quantities such as the fading margin and the Doppler frequency. It is shown that this scheme can guarantee limited delays with very high probability while allowing a very significant bandwidth utilization, and is therefore suitable for multimedia traffic over wireless. Other benefits of the scheme are the possibility of selective packet dropping and simple implementation of priorities and of on-demand QoS.