Patent ID: 7149192

Claim:
A base station implementing physical layer automatic repeat request, including a transmitter and a receiver, the base station for receiving data in data blocks from a higher layer ARQ mechanism, the base station comprising: a physical layer transmitter for receiving the data from the higher layer ARQ mechanism in data blocks, formatting the received data blocks into packets, the packets being smaller in size than the data blocks, each packet having a particular encoding/data modulation, appending the error check sequences, transmitting the packets, storing the packets for retransmission in a buffer memory incorporated into the transmitter, monitoring a return channel for receipt of an acknowledgment for each packet that the packet has been received, limiting the number of retransmissions to an operator-defined integer value, clearing the buffer memory after the integer value is reached, and retransmitting original or selectively modified packets in response to failure to receive a corresponding acknowledgment for a given packet; an acknowledgment receiver for receiving the corresponding acknowledgment; an adaptive modulation and coding controller for collecting retransmission statistics and adjusting the particular data encoding/modulation using the collected statistics; a physical layer receiver for demodulating received packets; a combiner/decoder for buffering, decoding and detecting packet errors; and an acknowledgment generator for generating an acknowledgment for each packet if that packet has an acceptable error rate; and wherein a physical layer ARQ mechanism comprising the physical layer transmitter and the acknowledgement receiver is transparent to the higher layer ARQ mechanism.