Abstract
This paper presents a new analytic framework for determining the reliability and average delay for a satellite communication system that uses a modified hybrid ARQ protocol for retransmission procedure. Key to the analysis is a method for explicitly determining decoder error and failure probabilities for a channel characterized by multiple dependent symbol error and erasure probabilities. In addition, a new method for determining the delay and reliability for a hybrid ARQ protocol using selective retransmission of codewords is derived for a system that utilizes multiple codewords per packet. The two techniques provide the capabilities of investigating different wireless multimedia satellite networks with variety of retransmission protocols and access methods.