STBC distributed ARQ scheme for OFDM ad-hoc wireless networks

In this paper, we propose a novel highly reliable packet transmission protocol for ad-hoc wireless networks without deciding the route from a source node to a destination node in advance. The proposed protocol uses distributed surrounding nodes as transmitters of the retransmission packet when the transmitted packet contains an error. In this protocol, when a packet is not correctly received at the destination node, the source node and the surrounding nodes that have correctly received the packet simultaneously retransmit the same data packet to the destination node. The transmitting timing is triggered by the control packet transmitted from the source node. These operations are repeated until the packet reaches to the destination node like automatic repeat request (ARQ). Moreover, the retransmitted packet is encoded by one branch of the space time block code (STBC) for improving the performance with the network diversity effect. We call this method as STBC Distributed ARQ scheme. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by the computer simulations.