A Go-Back-N Protocol for Mobile Communications

Mobile digital communication systems are generally affected by severe noise and disturbances such as multipath fading and Doppler effects that degrade the reliability of the received information. Automatic-repeat-request (ARQ) techniques, which include the go-back-N (GBN) protocol, are widely used to improve the performance of digital communication systems. This paper describes a GBN protocol, with a buffer and memory at the receiver side, which offers low implementation complexity and a structure especially suited to mobile communications. The optimization of the protocol parameters is determined through numerical analysis. Performance is evaluated by computer simulation using a channel model suitable for mobile communications. The results show that the proposed ARQ scheme achieves higher performance than that of other ARQ protocols, and that at high error rates, its efficiency compares favorably with selective repeat protocols having an infinite buffer.