A joint coding HARQ scheme for N-channel stop-and-wait protocol

Abstract

N-channel stop-and-wait (SW) hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocol is widely used in wireless communication systems due to its simplicity and high efficiency. However, different HARQ processes are transmitted over sub-channels with individual encoding. We present a joint coding HARQ scheme in which erroneous codewords of N parallel channels are jointly encoded for retransmissions. Erroneous and retransmitted codewords form a linear concatenated block code which is jointly decoded with a low complexity iterative decoding algorithm. Simulation results show that the normalized throughput performance obtains a significant gain while complexity increasing is limited.