Reduced-rate retransmissions for spread-spectrum packet radio multimedia networks

A reduced-rate retransmission (RRR) scheme is proposed for improving the throughput performance of spread-spectrum packet radio networks. The scheme takes advantages of the available multi-rate scalable source coding techniques. It assumes that several versions of a data packet with different sizes (number of information bits) are available. The transmission of a packet starts from its full-size version. If the full-size version is not correctly received, its half-size version is used in the retransmission. If further retransmissions are needed, the quarter-size version and so on are used. The shrunk packets are transmitted either in a minislot if the processing gain is kept the same, or occupying a slot duration by increasing the processing gain proportionally. In both cases, the effective signal to interference ratio for a packet is increased. As a result, the system throughput is improved. Theoretical and numerical results are provided in this paper which illustrate the throughput improvement. Another advantage of the proposed RRR scheme is that the packet-size reduction provides finer granules for link adaptation. Therefore, it is especially suitable for multimedia applications for which codes of variable rate for the source data are available and which can tolerate gracefully degraded quality of service. The performance of the proposed scheme in fading channels is also addressed.