Goodput analysis for lossy low-speed wireless networks during message segmentation

This paper derives the exact analytical form of goodput for wireless networks where packets generated from a message through a segmentation function are lost due to independent identically distributed bit errors, and these lost packets are recovered by a stop-and-wait protocol. In previous studies, packet sizes are assumed to be constant, which are payload size plus header/trailer size. However, the size of actual segmented packets is not necessarily constant. This is because the final packet in a segmented packet sequence created from a message, referred to as an edge packet, can vary in size. In a simple scenario where fixed-sized messages are transferred over a lossy and low-speed wireless network, such as a low power wide area network, we show that the goodput exhibits saw-tooth curves due to the variable-sized edge packets. Furthermore, we derive a simplified payload size to maximize goodput in which transferred packets utilize the payload most efficiently.