Some Results on Error Control for Burst-Error Channels under Delay Constraints

This paper considers the problem of designing an error-control scheme under delay constraints and presents some new results. In particular, the performance of some error-correction block codes and of the Go-Back-N retransmission scheme is investigated, when a packetized stream of bits is to be transmitted across a burst-error channel. The presence of a delay constraint causes degraded error-correction performance (due to nonideal interleaving). and block dropping in Go-Back-N (due to retransmission delay). An approximate characterization of the residual bit error rate at the output of the error-control scheme is presented, and the effect of the channel burstiness, type of codes used, and channel data rate on the tradeoffs between residual bit error rate and delay and between delay and achievable information rate is examined.