Hybrid Packet FEC and Retransmission-based Erasure Recovery Mechanisms for Lossy Networks: Analysis and Design

With increasing dependence on wireless networks as an integral part of the communication infrastructure, it is critical that data link and transport layer protocols perform reasonably under potentially severe lossy conditions. A key strategy is to use hybrid ARQ (HARQ) with erasure codes (a.k.a. forward error correction or FEC) sent both proactively and reactively in response to feedback about dynamic loss statistics. A challenge is to design HARQ to satisfy multiple objectives such as high goodput, low latency and negligible residual loss rate. In this paper, we analyze the performance benefits and trade-offs of these reliability strategies (hybrid ARQ+FEC). We derive expressions for the expected good-put (and overhead in terms of FEC wastage), latency, and residual loss for a given raw erasure loss process (e.g. uniform and bursty loss models). We show how the analysis can be used to explain and provide specialized design guidance for link-layer HARQ that is subject to tight delay constraints and a recently designed transport layer HARQ scheme (called loss-tolerant TCP). We validate our analysis by comparing the predictions with values obtained from simulations performed on the link and transport layer HARQ strategies with ns-2. We believe that such an analysis could also have value for other adaptive protocols using network coding and incremental redundancy techniques.