On ARQ feedback intensity of the IEEE 802.16 ARQ mechanism

The IEEE 802.16 standard defines the ARQ mechanism as a part of the MAC layer. The functioning of the ARQ mechanism depends on a number of parameters. The IEEE 802.16 specification defines them but it does not provide concrete values and solutions. We ran simulation scenarios to study how the ARQ feedback intensity impacts the performance of application protocols. The simulation results reveal that a low ARQ feedback intensity results only in a marginal improvement. Though it is possible to optimize the ARQ feedback intensity, it is reasonable to rely upon more frequent ARQ feedback messages as they do not result in a performance degradation. At the same time, ARQ connections, which work on top of HARQ, can delay the ARQ feedbacks up to the ARQ retry timeout to optimize the performance.