Enhanced HARQ for Delay Tolerant Services in Mobile Satellite Communications

The objective of our paper is to improve efficiency (in terms of throughput or system capacity) for mobile satellite communications. In this context, we propose an enhanced Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) for delay tolerant services. Our proposal uses the estimation of the mutual information. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method for a land mobile satellite channel by means of simulations. Results are compared with those obtained with a classical incremental redundancy (IR) HARQ scheme. The technique we propose, shows a better performance in terms of efficiency while maintaining an acceptable delay for services. Keywords—Hybrid ARQ; Satellite Communications; Land Mobile Satellite (LMS) Channel; Delay; Efficiency.