Evaluating Seven Year Total Cost of Ownership for LTE M Deployments
Seven year LTE-M deployment costs depend primarily on battery self-discharge rates, base station reselection energy, and technician field dispatch expenses.
Retransmission Overhead
Meaning
Protocols that resend lost or corrupted data packets introduce a specific type of traffic that occupies bandwidth without delivering new information. Retransmission overhead occurs when a receiver detects an error and requests the same data block again or when a timer expires without an acknowledgment. This measurement is used to assess the quality of a radio link.
Capacity Penalty
Every packet sent for a second time reduces the total amount of unique data the channel carries.
Delivery Delay
The time required to detect a failure and send the replacement packet increases the overall time it takes for information to reach the application. For real-time services, excessive retransmission overhead causes jitter and packet drops that the user experiences as audio or video stutters. Buffering strategies at the receiver try to mask these delays by holding data before playback, but this approach has limits when the network quality remains low for an extended period.
Energy Drain
Transmitting the same data multiple times increases the power used by the radio hardware for every successful megabyte transferred. Devices with limited battery life suffer when retransmission overhead is high because the modem must remain in an active state for longer periods. Optimization of the physical layer aims to keep this repetition to a minimum to extend the operating time of the mobile unit in the field.