Towards Efficient Retransmission in Dense Networks With Interference Correlation

Exploiting the time-varying feature of wireless channels, retransmission could enable reliable data transmission. However, the growing deployment of small cell base stations (BSs) would induce significant temporal interference correlation. In consequence, once the current transmission fails, the subsequent ones are likely to fail as well. In this light, we investigate the retransmission performance in dense networks with temporally correlated interference in terms of network spatial throughput (ST). Our results reveal that the impact of temporal interference correlation on the retransmission performance critically depends on the BS density. Specifically, temporal interference correlation would cause a greater network ST attenuation when the BS density is closer to the critical density, under which network ST is maximized. Moreover, the impact of temporal interference correlation is shown to be cumulative as the number of retransmission attempts increases. Furthermore, towards efficient retransmission, we adopt and optimize a P-Activation strategy (PAS). It is shown that the optimized PAS is able to effectively mitigate the overwhelming strength and temporal correlation of interference. As a result, the retransmission performance in improving network ST is significantly enhanced in dense networks, while the variation of network ST with BS density exhibits sigmoid trend instead of the previous near-bell shape.