How to implement GBN-ARQ the hard way: DECT

The European standard for digital cordless telecommunication DECT is considered as a means for data communication. Up to now, most applications of DECT concerned speech transmission on a single full-duplex 32 kbit/s channel, but DECT provides ways for allocating more bandwidth, even in an asymmetric fashion, called the multi-bearer service. The ETSI defined a number of different automatic repeat request (ARQ) schemes to enable DECT to control retransmissions of lost or corrupted data packets. A general critique of the way ETSI standardized DECT's go-back-N (GBN) ARQ scheme is given. The performance loss through the unnecessary combination of a MAC-MOD2-ARQ (send-and-wait) with a GBN is demonstrated by the use of examples.