Cross-Layer Performance Analysis of TCP over Wireless Link with AMC and Type-III HARQ

Abstract

This paper is concerned with a wireless access system with adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) at the physical layer (PHY), Type-Ill hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) at the data link layer (LL) and transport control protocol (TCP) at the transport layer. In order to evaluate the quality-of-service (QoS) of TCP, we analyze the queueing behavior induced by both AMC and Type-Ill HARQ with an embedded Markov chain and study the interaction between AMC, Type-Ill HARQ and TCP via a fixed-point procedure. To maximize the TCP throughput for QoS-guaranteed traffic, we propose a cross-layer design which optimizes the target packet error rate (PER) for AMC at the PHY as well as the maximum number of retransmission for Type-III HARQ at the LL.