Feedback Aggregation Based Retransmission Scheme for Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Automatic-repeat-request (ARQ) based decode-and-forward (DF) strategy plays an important role in reliable multi-hop communication. However, when a large number of packets need to be transmitted, the overhead for control messages increases significantly and it causes large end-to-end delay which is unacceptable in some emergency scenarios. To minimize the control traffic overhead, we propose a low latency feedback aggregation based packet retransmission protocol for wireless multi-hop networks. The source node transmits data packets within the sliding window constantly. The relay nodes and destination node choose to work with the proposed end-to-end retransmission scheme or the proposed half-way retransmission scheme according to the size of sliding window and the number of hops. In the proposed end-to-end transmission scheme, the destination node sends one ACK packet which includes trans-mission results of all packets in the sliding windows. In the halfway retransmission scheme, the relay nodes send NACK to the previous node for retransmission. Simulation results show that compared with traditional hop-by-hop retransmission, our method can achieve lower latency.