MAC LAYER RETRANSMISSIONS IN 1XTREME

Mainak Chatterjee1 , Giridhar D. Mandyam2 and Sajal K. Das1

1 Center for Research in Wireless Mobility and Networking (CReWMaN)

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Texas at Arlington
Arlington, TX-76019-0015
E-mail:fchat,dasg@cse.uta.edu
2 Nokia Research Center
6000 Connection Drive
Irving, TX-75039
E-mail: giridhar.mandyam@nokia.com

Abstract - In this paper, we study the joint reliability as
offered by the medium access control (MAC) and the ra-
dio link protocol (RLP) in CDMA systems, particularly for
1XTREME. The retransmission mechanism in the RLP has
considerable amount of delay associated with it which might
not be able to sustain real-time communications with strict de-
lay requirements. Retransmissions done at a lower layer, such
as the MAC, enhances the performance of the system. We
show how the performance varies with respect to delay and
throughput as observed from the RLP, for finite number of re-
transmissions at the MAC. We find that there is a substantial
gain in the performance with the incorporation of fast retrans-
missions at the MAC. Synthetically generated HTTP traffic
was used as the application, the objects of which were frag-
mented into equal sized RLP frames. We consider a 1-path
Rayleigh fading channel with correlated errors. We also con-
sider that soft packet combining at the receiver is supported,
which effectively lowers the frame error rate (FER). Simula-
tion experiments are conducted to verify the performance as
offered by the MAC and the RLP.
Keywords - CDMA networks, radio link protocol, medium
access control, retransmission, packet combing, 1XTREME.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Transport Control Protocol (TCP) is still the major suite
for the Internet Protocol (IP) and provides reliable end-to-
end transmission. All the emerging wireless data technolo-
gies today rely on the IP-based network because IP is the most
dominant inter-networking protocol. As the World Wide Web
(WWW) traffic continues to grow, it is important that these
kinds of services are also supported in the wireless domain.
The design of TCP has been such that it performs well in
wireline networks where the channel error rates are extreme ly
low and whatever congestion occurs is due to loss of packets.
However, when TCP is used in the wireless domain which is
characterized by high bit error rate, the performance of TCP
severely degrades [3]. Any packet loss at the wireless link
is interpreted as congestion by TCP which responds to it by
reducing the transmission window size, initiating the conges-
tion control mechanism and resetting the retransmission time.
The congestion control mechanism designed for wireline net-
works causes an unnecessary reduction in the TCP throughput.
Several schemes have been proposed to alleviate the effects of
non-congestion related losses over wireless links [2], [4], [7].
Radio Link Protocol (RLP) is one such scheme which
shields the effect of the loss over wireless links from the TCP
layer [3], [6]. The RLP is generally employed between the
physical layer and the TCP layer. It breaks down an upper
layer packet (a TCP segment in this case) into several RLP
frames before transmitting over the wireless channel as shown
in Figure 1. A physical layer header is added to the RLP frame
before it is mapped on to a physical layer frame for transmis-
sion. The fragmentation is done to reduce the granularity of
the transmission, i.e, in case of any error, an RLP frame which
is of a smaller size is affected rather than the whole TCP seg-
ment. In case of an RLP frame loss during transmission, the
RLP uses an Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) error recov-
ery mechanism to retrieve the lost RLP frame. The process
for recovery of erroneous frames is initiated by the receiver by
requesting retransmission of the erroneous frames. Recovery
of the erroneous frames should be done before the TCP timer
expires for the TCP throughput to remain unaffected.
Radio link protocols are usually sufficient to shield the phys-
ical layer impairment from the TCP, but might fail to do so if
the application has very strict delay requirements. The delay
associated with retransmissions at the RLP might not be small
enough to sustain a real-time application. Similar problems
will arise if we deal with interactive real-time traffic. In such
scenarios, the TCP timer might time-out before the RLP recov-
ers a missing frame. To tackle this problem, another fast re-
transmission mechanism must be incorporated below the RLP
layer. This can be done by an ARQ mechanism at the MAC
layer, thus providing two layers of retransmission reliability.
Our main motivation behind this work is to study the reliabil-
ity offered jointly by the RLP and the MAC layers of CDMA
systems (particularly for 1XTREME) in supporting HTTP traf-
fic. We analyze the delay and throughput as experienced by
the MAC and the RLP for finite number of retransmissions.
We model the wireless channel as 1-path Rayleigh fading with
correlated errors and consider soft packet combining at the
receiver which effectively lowers the frame error rate (FER).
Simulation experiments are also conducted to validate the cor-
rectness of the model. It is observed that there is tremendous
gain if the MAC offers at least one retransmission, however, Then TCP uses its own ARQ mechanism to recover the miss-
the gain does not increase substantially if the number of re- ing frames.
transmissions is made more than two. The recovery rate of In a selective NACK based scheme, NACKs are sent out
missing frames at the RLP is prominent at higher FER and also only on the detection of missing frames. Therefore, the trans-
when the misinterpretations of acknowledgements are high. mitter takes no action unless and until a NACK is received.
Conversely, in an ACK based scheme, the transmitter waits for
TCP Segment / IP Packet the ACKs. The optimization problem here is to find the optimal
timer value i.e., the time a transmitter has to wait before it can
retransmit. If the timer is set to a low value then retransmis-
sions will be triggered even for correctly received frames, thus
header Payload header Payload header Payload lowering the throughput. On the other hand, if the timer is set
to a high value then the delay of sequencing and reassembling
RLP frame No. 1 RLP frame No. 2 RLP frame No. L the packets would be high. So, an optimal value of the timer
is desirable and should be customized for a particular kind of
header RLP frame channel.
To avoid the delay associated with retransmissions at the
Physical Layer Packet RLP, a faster lower layer MAC-ARQ can be used. The faster
retransmissions can provide a better round trip time for real-
Fig. 1. Fragmentation of TCP segments time applications. Since the number of transmissions allowed
at the MAC layer is finite, it does not completely eliminate the
II. R ETRANSMISSIONS AT RLP AND MAC L AYERS possibility of having missing or damaged frames. If the MAC-
In this section, we will briefly introduce the necessary back- ARQ fails to deliver a frame correctly even after retransmitting
ground on 1XTREME required for this study. We will mainly the maximum allowed number of times, then responsibility is
discuss the retransmission mechanism at the RLP and the fast passed on to the RLP to retrieve the frame. Thus we deal with
ARQ mechanism at the MAC layer. two layers of retransmission reliability as shown in Figure 2.

A. 1XTREME From application To application

Air interface
1XTREME (1X ThiRd-generation Enhanced Modulation RLP RLP
and Encoding) is an IS-2000 compatible standard which sup- RLP header added RLP header removed
ports both voice and data on the same CDMA channels. It is RLP NACK
header Payload header Payload
one of the active projects of the 3GPP2 standards body wherein
the modifications and enhancements to the IS-2000 CDMA
standard are dealt with. This evolution of IS-2000 tries to
meet the increase in demand for both voice (real-time) and data MAC MAC
(best-effort) services. 1XTREME is one such system which MAC header added ACK/NACK MAC header removed
supports a mix of both best-effort packet data services and real- header Payload header Payload
Packets
time voice services on the same carrier. Some of the features transmmitted
of 1XTREME are multicode channel aggregation, higher order Transmitter side Receiver side
modulation, link adaptation and hybrid ARQ. More detailed
Fig. 2. Two layer reliability
discussion on 1XTREME can be found in [1], [8].
C. Fast MAC-ARQ
B. Retransmissions at RLP The fast ARQ mechanism (also called MAC-ARQ) in
There are various ways in which the RLP acknowledges the 1XTREME ensures that some performance loss can be recov-
correctly received packets. The IS-95 and its evolutions, IS-95- ered. There are two reasons why RLP cannot provide the func-
B and cdma2000, use NACK based RLP with a finite number tionality needed for MAC-ARQ in 1XTREME. First, in the
of retransmissions. When the RLP finds a missing frame or a process of selecting the base station with the strongest signal
frame in error, then it sends a NACK requesting for a retrans- for the cell selection, RLP terminates at the last network ele-
mission. If the requested frame is not received within a stipu- ment (for example, base station) resulting in network delays
lated time (given by a timer), then another NACK is sent to the in servicing retransmission requests at the RLP layer. Sec-
transmitter and the timer is reset. Each NACK received at the ond, the forward shared control channel might contain sev-
transmitter triggers a retransmission of the requested frame. eral protocol data units (PDU’s), not all of which come from
Since the number of allowable repeated requests for a frame is RLP. As a result, the MAC-ARQ provides retransmissions
finite, the RLP cannot completely eliminate detectable errors. quickly in 1XTREME which employs a stop-and-wait hybrid
After the maximum number of retransmission attempts have ARQ method. In this method each packet received by the re-
been made without success, the RLP aborts its recovery pro- ceiver must be acknowledged on a dedicated feedback chan-
cess and passes on the responsibility to the higher layer (TCP). nel to the transmitter. This dedicated feedback takes the form
of the reverse acknowledgment indicator and takes values +1
for an ACK or 1 for a NACK. However, the receiver does
not discard the received soft-information associated with the
incorrectly-received packet. Rather, it buffers the data and co-
herently combines the buffered data with the received soft in-
formation of the retransmission of the bad packet [9]. This type
of packet combining provides increased reliability in CDMA
systems.
1XTREME uses n-phase stop-and-wait MAC-ARQ. By “n-
phase” it is meant that multiple ARQ instances are employed
in consecutive time slots (i.e., 5-ms frame durations). For in-
stance, assume 3 ARQ channels are used. Then in time slot t,
the receiver will receive a packet corresponding to phase 1. In
time slot t+1 , the receiver will receive a packet corresponding
to phase 2. In time slot t +2 , the receiver will receive a packet
corresponding to phase 3. In time slot t +3, the receiver will
receive a packet corresponding to phase 1 again, and so on.
The receiver must keep separate packets received for different
phases for packet combining and packet acknowledgements;
however, once any packet for any phase is received correctly,
the receiver may deliver the packets to the higher layers (e.g.
RLP). The timing diagram for this scheme is explained later in
Section IV-B.
D. Packet Combining
In order to ensure that the receiver does not try to combine
packets from one ARQ phase with another, outband signaling
is sent on the forward shared control channel concurrently with
each frame that the receiver receives on the forward shared
channel. It can be noted that the FER experienced by a packet
during its 1st transmission is not the same as that during the
2nd transmission. It is less in the latter case because there is at
least a 3-db gain in the bit energy-to-noise ratio (Eb =No ) due
to packet combining.
III. P ERFORMANCE M ODELING
We will mainly concentrate on the delay and throughput as
experienced by the RLP in 1XTREME. We do not consider
the time taken for a packet to get scheduled for transmission
at the RLP. The delay considered is the delay suffered by a
packet before it is received correctly by the RLP at the receiver
and delivered to the upper layer. We define throughput as the
ratio of the number of successful packets received to the total
number of packets undergoing transmission. RLP recovery is
defined as the fraction of the packets recovered by the RLP
when the MAC fails to deliver a packet correctly.
We assume that there is no transmission delay, i,e., if a
packet is successfully transmitted at the first trial then the delay
incurred is zero. This assumption can be taken care by adding
an offset (with a statistical fluctuation) to the delay value. It can
be noted that it takes about N  T ms, where N is the number
of ARQ phases and T is the frame duration, for the ACK to
reach the transmitter. It is only then that the transmitter can re-
move the packet from its transmission buffer. If a packet does
not successfully reach the receiver at the first trial, then on the
receipt of a NACK, it will undergo retransmission. Some delay
will be incurred while the MAC tries its fast ARQ mechanism
to retransmit and recover the missing packet. The maximum
number of retransmissions allowed is given by the system pa-
rameter MAXRETRANS. If the packet is still not recovered,
then the RLP triggers its own retransmission mechanism.
Thus, the total delay (D ) experienced by a packet to success-
fully reach the receiver can potentially have two components:
the delay (DMAC ) due to the MAC-ARQ mechanism and the
delay (DRLP ) due to the RLP retransmissions. Hence the total
delay D can be defined as
D = D MAC + DRLP : (1)
A. Channel Characteristics
In a wireless environment, the characteristics of the radio
channel is very important since the channel conditions vary
with time and space. There are several negative factors that
affect the link attenuation. The hindrance may be due to mul-
tipath fading, shadowing or any other noise source. The most
commonly used AWGN (additive white Gaussian noise) chan-
nels do not represent the channel conditions accurately. A
more realistic view of the channel is necessary for any kind
of analysis or experimentation. Moreover, the channel model
should include the correlated errors, which is most often the
case. Therefore, we consider 1-path Rayleigh model for the
losses which generally has the worst behavior amongst multi-
path Rayleigh models for CDMA systems.
B. Effective FER
Whenever a packet is not correctly decoded at the receiver,
the packet is not discarded but stored in the buffer. It has been
observed that there is a gain of 3-db in the Eb =No value if
the retransmitted packet is combined with the stored packet.
If the packet is not correctly decoded even after the packet
combination, the packet is retransmitted for the second time (if
2
MAXRETRANS  ). With the second retransmitted packet
the gain in Eb =No would be 6-db. That is, with every retrans-
mission there is a gain of 3-db. If we consider 1-path Rayleigh
channel with 12 rate 8-PSK modulation, then according to sim-
ulations the effective FER would approximately fall to one-
third its value for every transmission. The FER for successive
retransmissions (RET) is shown is Table 1. These values were
obtained through simulation of the said channel. Although,
the decrease in the effective FER could not be generalized, it
works well with Rayleigh fading channels. For example, if the
FER is 0.3 for the initial transmission (Tx), then on succes-
sive retransmissions the effective FER would be 0.095, 0.031,
0.0095 and so on, decreasing by approximately one-third every
time.
C. Delay and RLP Recovery Analysis
Let us now derive the expressions for mean delay and
throughput for MAXRETRANS = M . We assume that the
raw FER offered by the physical channel is p. When a packet
is transmitted, the MAC usually waits for certain number of
ARQ phases (NARQP = N ) for the ACK. We will derive the
expressions for M =1 and M =2 first and then derive the
general expression.
 Table 1 Table 2
Effective FER Statistics for HTTP
Initial First Second Third Component Distribution Mean
Tx RET RET RET Main page size Lognormal 10710 bytes
0.05 0.018 0.005 0.001 Embedded object size Lognormal 7758 bytes
0.10 0.032 0.010 0.003 No. of embedded objects Pareto 5.55
0.15 0.050 0.018 0.006 Viewing time Weibull 40 ms
0.20 0.065 0.020 0.005
0.25 0.075 0.025 0.008 IV. S IMULATION M ODEL
0.30 0.095 0.031 0.0095 To validate our analytical model, we perform simulation ex-
periments to obtain the average delay and the throughput. In
1) Case: M=1: The waiting time for a packet which is un-
our simulation model, we assume that the RLP payload is of
successfully received on the first transmission is N T , where
constant size and each RLP frame maps to one physical layer
N is the number of ARQ phases and T is the frame dura-
frame. We choose HTTP as the application to be supported
tion. Therefore, the average waiting time for all the packets
at the MAC layer is DMAC =
pN T , where p is the FER of
because supporting real-time WWW traffic on the mobile ter-
minals is a major challenge. Let us briefly discuss the HTTP
the wireless channel. The packets which will still fail to reach
model considered.
the receiver successfully will be recovered by the RLP. The
packets which are being recovered by RLP would have a delay Packet call Packet call

of M  N T = N T , since M =1
. This time is essentially
the RLP timer for triggering a retransmission. The fraction of
packets that would have been taken care by RLP would be p
if M =0 . Now for M =1
, the fraction would be 13 p  p, Viewing time
assuming the FER will drop to one-third its value. Thus, the
average delay at the RLP is DRLP 3 =
1 p2  N T and the total Download time
Main page

+ 31
Embedded objects
delay is given by
D = pN T
2
p NT: (2)
A. HTTP Model
Fig. 3. Web page traffic

Recall that the RLP recovery (R) is defined as the fraction of We do not try to investigate the nature of HTTP traffic. In-
packets recovered by RLP. This fraction is not p
2 because of stead we synthetically generate HTTP traffic by using the re-

R = 13
packet combining and it is given by sults obtained in [5]. The basic model of HTTP is shown in
2 Figure 3. A packet call represents the download of a web page
p : (3)
2) Case: M=2: Since the ACKs of p  (
of the 100)% requested by a user. It usually has a main page followed by
retransmitted packets are not expected to arrive, these pack- some embedded objects. A new request (packet call) is im-
ets need to be retransmitted again (second MAC retransmis- mediately generated after the expiration of the viewing period.
sion). The effective FER observed now will be 13 p. There- The model is similar to an ON/OFF source where the ON state
fore, the average delay associated with the second retrans- represents the activity of a page request and the OFF state rep-
mission is 13 p  pN T , leading to the delay at the MAC as resents a silent period after all objects in that page are retrieved.
DMAC = pN T + 3 p  pN T . The fraction of packets that
1 The download time of a page follows Weibull distribution, the
would have been taken care by RLP, if M =1
, would be 13 p2 . mean of which depends on the underlying bandwidth of the
Since M =2 , the fraction would be 13 p  31 p . Therefore, the
2 wireless channel. We have considered a data rate of 76.8 Kbps
delay at the RLP would be DRLP =( ) 2 3 p p  N T and the
1 2 (9600 bytes/sec). Other statistics and parameters used to gen-
erate the HTTP traffic are shown in Table 2.

+ 13  + ( 13 )2  2
total delay is obtained as
D= pN T p pN T p p NT: (4) 0 1 2 3 0 4 2 5 0 6 7

R = ( 31 )2
The RLP recovery in this case would be
5 ms
p p: (5)
20 ms
3) Case: General: Following in a similar manner as above,
we can calculate the delay and throughput for any M  . The 3 NO NO NO

XM
ACK ACK ACK ACK ACK ACK ACK

total delay would be Fig. 4. NARQP = 4 Timing

D = ( 1 )i3 p
1
pN T + ( 13 )M 
p p MNT: (6) B. Fast ARQ
i=1 Each object (main page and embedded objects) is frag-
The summation term is due to the M retransmissions at the
mented into multiple equal-sized RLP packets. The transmitter
MAC layer and the second term is due RLP retransmissions.
transmits one RLP packet in each 5 ms physical layer frame

R = ( 13 )M
Similarly, the RLP recovery would be
and waits for the ACK. If the ACK does not arrive in 20 ms
p p (7)
 Table 3 1
MAXRETRANS=0
MAXRETRANS=1

Simulation Parameters MAXRETRANS=2

MAXRETRANS=3
0.95

NARQP (N ) 4
0.9
MAXRETRANS (M ) 1, 2 and 3

Throughput
FER (p) 0 - 30% 0.85

Frame duration (T ) 5 ms
RLP payload 400 bytes 0.8

0.75

(NARQP = 4) then the frame is retransmitted immediately as

shown in Figure 4. The ACK timer for that packet is again 0.7
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3
FER
reinitialized. If we consider the down link, then it is not neces- Fig. 6. Throughput
sary that the mobile station will deliver the ACK/NACK pre- 0.45
MAXRETRANS=0

cisely at the slot boundaries each of which is 5 ms. The actual 0.4
MAXRETRANS=1
MAXRETRANS=2
MAXRETRANS=3

physical layer boundary is more precise. This is due to the 0.35

fact that normally when using coherent receivers in the reverse 0.3

link (for example in IS-2000 and 1XTREME), the base-station

RLP recovery
0.25
suffers from some processing delay. The number of retrans-
0.2
mission trials allowed is varied between 1 and 3. If a packet
is not successfully received or combined at the receiver even 0.15

after the maximum number of MAC retransmissions, then the 0.1

RLP retransmission is triggered. The other parameters for the 0.05

simulation are given in Table 3. 0

0 0.1 0.2 0.3
FER

C. Simulation Results Fig. 7. RLP recovery

Figure 5 shows the delay for various MAXRETRANS.
There is not much difference between MAXRETRANS = 2
and MAXRETRANS = 3. This is due to the fact that after two
transmissions, most of the packets are recovered and the third
retransmission is hardly required. Figure 6 shows the through-
put of the system. By throughput we mean the throughput due
to MAC and RLP combined. It can be seen that the through-
put decreases as the FER increases. This is obvious because
larger FER damages more packets resulting in higher number
of retransmitted packets. In Figure 7 we observe the efficiency
of the RLP recovering the missing packets. If the MAC-ARQ
mechanism is turned off, which effectively means MAXRE-
TRANS = 0, all the missing packets are recovered by RLP.
With MAXRETRANS = 1, there is a considerable drop in the
RLP recovery because the MAC does most of the recovery
with just one retransmission. With MAXRETRANS = 2 and
3, the RLP recovery is almost zero because virtually all the
packets are recovered with three retransmissions.
7
MAXRETRANS=1
MAXRETRANS=2
MAXRETRANS=3
6
5 tocols in Mobile Computing Environments”, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in
Mean delay (ms)
V. C ONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we showed how real-time data can be deliv-
ered with the help of retransmissions offered by both MAC and
RLP. The MAC-ARQ allows a finite number of fast retransmis-
sions and quickly recovers the lost or damaged packets. Due
to soft packet combining, the effective FER experienced by a
packet is lowered by one-third for every successive retransmis-
sion. If the MAC is unsuccessful in delivering a packet, then
the RLP invokes its own retransmission mechanism to retrieve
the packet. From the simulation results obtained, we observe
that the fast retransmission mechanism at the MAC layer en-
hances the overall system performance. However, there is not
much improvement if the maximum number of retransmissions
at the MAC (MAXRETRANS) is greater than two. Also, the
recovery by the RLP becomes crucial if the FER is high.
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