Packet discard notification for semi reliable retransmission protocol

摘要

A telecommunications system and method is disclosed for implementing a semi-reliable retransmission protocol that utilizes both selective repeat Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) and segmentation and assembly of data packets. The new semi-reliable retransmission protocol includes a timer based triggering of a retransmission timeout for retransmission protocols, which allows the retransmission timeout to become insensitive to variations in the channel rate. In addition, the retransmission timeout can be defined based upon the maximum delay allowable for the retransmission of corrupted data packets over the air interface. For every data packet received a timer monitoring the transmission time of the data packet is initialized. If the timer elapses for the data packet this data packet is marked as discarded in the transmitter, and a request is sent to the receiver to ensure that transmissions carrying that data packet are discarded in the receiver.