An automatic repeat request (ARQ) scheme which pre-empts the need for the retransmission of data is described. A detailed statistical analysis is carried out and numerical results are presented which show that, under a wide range of high error rate and/or long propagation delay conditions, considerable improvements in performance over the commonly used go-back-Nprotocol can be achieved with the scheme. The scheme has the advantage of being logically simple and should be capable of straightforward implementation as an extension of software handling the go-back-Nprotocol.