Performance analysis of multiroute packet combining scheme for real‐time communications in wireless multihop networks

In this research, real-time packet communications on wireless multihop networks is considered. Since the communications quality is substantially degraded by packet delay in real-time packet communications, packet retransmission is not usually used. In order to suppress the effect of packet errors in the communications channel on communications quality in such cases, this paper proposes an application of a multiroute packet combining scheme on a wireless multihop network. The performance of the proposed scheme depends on the time required for transmission of a packet on each route and the start time of packet combining at the destination node, in addition to the number of transmitted duplicate packets at the source node. In order to evaluate the constantly changing system performance from the viewpoint of the quality of service (QoS) required in real-time communications, the distribution function of the time needed for attaining a certain required packet error rate and the average packet error rate attainable at a certain time are analytically derived. From numerical examples, it is proven that there exists a number of transmitted duplicate packets minimizing the required time for attaining the required packet error rate, and also a number of transmitted duplicate packets minimizing the average packet rate attainable within an allowed delay time. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 1, 89(1): 34–44, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecja.20238