Performance of FEC and ARQ error control in bursty channels under delay constraints

In local wireless communications, the use of retransmission techniques to recover from channel errors are a feasible solution, which in some instances may be more efficient than forward error correction. We compare the performance of BCH block codes and pure ARQ when a continuous stream of bits is to be transmitted across a burst-error channel. The presence of a delay constraint is considered, which causes degraded BCH error-correction performance (due to non-ideal interleaving) and block dropping in ARQ (due to retransmission delay). In most cases, for practical values of the parameters, better performance is achieved by ARQ schemes.