Can Retransmissions of Superexponential Documents Cause Subexponential Delays?

— Consider a generic data unit of random size L that needs to be transmitted over a channel of unit capacity. The channel dynamics is modeled as an on-off process {(Ai, Ui)}i≥1 with alternating independent periods when channel is available Ai and unavailable Ui, respectively. During each period of time that the channel becomes available, say Ai, we attempt to transmit the data unit. If L ≤ Ai, the transmission was considered successful; otherwise, we wait for the next period Ai+1 when the channel is available and attempt to retransmit the data from the beginning. We study the asymptotic properties of the total transmission time T and number of retransmissions N until the data is successfully transmitted. In recent studies [1], [2], it was proved that the waiting time T follows a power law when the distributions of L and A1 are of an exponential type, e.g., Gamma distribution. In this paper, we show that the distributions of N and T follow power laws with exponent α as long as lo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Predrag R. Jelenkovic, Jian Tan
• Keywords: Communications, Data Unit, INFOCOM 2007, Power Law Distributions, Power Laws