Abstract

A transport protocol that meets the requirements and performance for multimedia data transfer in a wireless link includes a transmitting/sending station and a receiving station. The inventive protocol is referred to as the Burst-oriented Transport with Time-bounded Retransmission (BTTR). This scheme uses a large transmission window for sending/receiving a burst of time-sensitive data and, within this window, several smaller observation windows are used for dynamic error retransmission. There is a time limitation on each retransmission such that the burst of data can be received in a timely manner, and thus trading some packet losses (still in an acceptable range) for delay and throughput performance. Specifically, the wireless network includes a wireless station for transmitting data over a wireless link. The sending station transmits a plurality of sequential data packets to the receiving station, wherein each plurality of sequential data packets form a respective Group-of-Packet (GOP). The receiving station detects whether any of the received data packets in each current GOP are corrupted before receipt of all data packets in the current GOP. The receiving station then transmits a negative acknowledgement (ACK) packet to the sending station before the receipt of all data packets in the current GOP, if at least one data packet in the current GOP is corrupted. Note that the ACK packet indicates which data packets are corrupted. In addition, the sending station selectively retransmits the data packets based on the indication of the received ACK packet before transmitting the next GOP to the receiving station.