Enhancing Satellite System Throughput Using Adaptive HARQ for Delay Tolerant Services in Mobile Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive HARQ scheme for mobile satellite communications that improves throughput for delay-tolerant services by estimating mutual information to optimize retransmissions, outperforming static HARQ.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel adaptive HARQ method tailored for satellite links, enhancing throughput and efficiency over traditional static schemes.

Findings

Adaptive HARQ improves throughput in satellite channels.

The method maintains acceptable delay levels.

Simulation results show better efficiency than static HARQ.

Abstract

In this paper we propose the introduction of adaptive hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) in the context of mobile satellite communications. HARQ schemes which are commonly used in terrestrial links, can be adapted to improve the throughput for delay tolerant services. The proposed method uses the estimation of the mutual information between the received and the sent symbols, in order to estimate the number of bits necessary to decode the message at next transmission. We evaluate the performance of our method by simulating a land mobile satellite (LMS) channel. We compare our results with the static HARQ scheme, showing that our adaptive retransmission technique has better efficiency while keeping an acceptable delay for services.