Journal international des réseaux de capteurs et des communications de données

Delivery Delay Analysis of Selective Repeat ARQ in Underwater Acoustic Communications

Abstract

Mingsheng Gao, Jian Li, Wei Li and Ning Xu

Despite being the most efficient automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol, the selective-repeat ARQ (SR-ARQ) is previously thought to be infeasible in underwater acoustic communications owing to the half-duplex property of typical underwater acoustic modems. However, with the help of the juggling-like stop-and-wait (JSW) transmission scheme, it has now become feasible. In this paper, we evaluate the delivery delay (consisting of transmission and resequencing delays) of the SR-ARQ operating over the JSW scheme under the static assumption that the relative radial velocity between the transmitter and the receiver is zero, aiming to provide system designers with a valuable reference for delay evaluation under more general scenarios. We model the underwater acoustic channel as a two-state Discrete Time Markov Channel, and derive the closed-form expression for the delivery delay under heavy traffic situation. Unlike most analytical approaches for the delay analysis of SR-ARQ in terrestrial communications whose computational complexities grow exponentially with round-trip delay, our proposed analytical approach is immune to the round-trip delay. This also makes our approach suitable for terrestrial communications. To highlight the accuracy of our approach, we also provide comparisons between analytical and simulation results.