Energy efficient hybrid ARQ scheme under error constraints

Due to the volatile characteristics of wireless channel and limited battery resource in the handheld devices, high throughput and energy efficiency are important criteria for the design of mobile communication protocols. This paper proposes an energy efficient error control scheme, which has on-demand quality of services for wireless data networks. This scheme can be utilized to accomplish the dual goals of reducing energy consumption and preserving quality of service over wireless links. It combines a simple power control scheme with a hybrid automatic repeat request strategy using rate-compatible punctured convolutional codes. In order to increase the system utility, the power and the coding rate for the data transmission are adjusted to match the channel variation. In case of frame error rate being constrained, such as 10^-6, the throughput and utility are analysed and it is found that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing schemes that use only error control.