A Hybrid ARQ Scheme Based on Rate-Compatible Low-Density Parity-Check Codes by Shortening and Extending

Abstract

Incremental Redundancy Hybrid ARQ (IR-HARQ) based on rate-compatible punctured low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes can achieve high throughput over a wide range of SNRs. One drawback of such IR-HARQ schemes is high computational complexity of decoding for early transmission at high rates. In order to overcome this problem, a HARQ scheme based on rate-compatible LDPC codes by shortening and extending is presented in this paper. In the HARQ scheme, a high-rate mother code is transmitted at first, and parity-bits of a shortened code are transmitted for early retransmission requests. With a low-complexity decoder of the high-rate mother code, this shortened-code approach would result in low computational complexity of decoding, but it causes smaller length and larger number of shortened codes to be decoded as retransmission repeats. To prevent the resultant degradation of performance and complexity, extending is efficiently applied to the shortened codes after predetermined retransmission-times. A multi-edge type code-design is employed to construct irregular LDPC codes that meet the requirement of the HARQ scheme. Simulation results show that the HARQ scheme can achieve lower computational complexity of decoding than a conventional IR-HARQ scheme with good throughput over a wide range of SNRs.