Conventional Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request Research Articles

An Adaptive Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (A-HARQ) Scheme Based on Reinforcement Learning

V2X communication is susceptible to attenuation and fading caused by external interference. This interference often leads to bit error and poor quality and stability of the wireless link, and it can easily disrupt packet transmission. In order to enhance communication reliability, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) introduced the Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) technology for both 4G and 5G systems. Nevertheless, it can be improved for poor communication conditions (e.g., heavy traffic flow, long-distance transmission), especially in advanced or cooperative driving scenarios. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (A-HARQ) scheme that can reduce the average block error rate, the average number of retransmissions, and the round-trip time (RTT). It adapts the Q-learning model to select the timing and frequency of retransmission to enhance the transmission reliability. We also design some transmission schemes—K-repetition, T-delay and [T, K]-overlap—which are used to shorten latency and avoid packet collision. Compared with the conventional 5G HARQ, our simulation results show that the proposed A-HARQ scheme decreases the system’s average BLER, the number of retransmissions, and the RTT to 5.55%, 1.55 ms, and 0.97 ms, respectively.

Highly-Efficient Low-Latency HARQ Built on NOMA for URLLC: Radio Resource Allocation and Transmission Rate Control Aspects

Hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) is an essential technology that efficiently reduces the transmission error rate. However, for ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC) in the 5th generation mobile communication systems and beyond, the increase in latency due to retransmission must be minimized in HARQ. In this paper, we propose a highly-efficient low-latency HARQ method built on non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for URLLC while minimizing the performance loss for coexisting services (use cases) such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB). The proposed method can be seen as an extension of the conventional link-level non-orthogonal HARQ to the system-level protocol. This mitigates the problems of the conventional link-level non-orthogonal HARQ, which are decoding error under poor channel conditions and an increase in transmission delay due to restrictions in retransmission timing. In the proposed method, delay-sensitive URLLC packets are preferentially multiplexed with best-effort eMBB packets in the same channel using superposition coding to reduce the transmission latency of the URLLC packet while alleviating the throughput loss in eMBB. This is achieved using a weighted channel-aware resource allocator (scheduler). The inter-packet interference multiplexed in the same channel is removed using a successive interference canceller (SIC) at the receiver. Furthermore, the transmission rates for the initial transmission and retransmission are controlled in an appropriate manner for each service in order to deal with decoding errors caused by error in transmission rate control originating from a time varying channel. We show that the proposed method significantly improves the overall performance of a system that simultaneously provides eMBB and URLLC services.

Free-Ride Feedback and Superposition Retransmission Over LDPC Coded Links

In this paper, we propose a new transmission scheme for the scenario where two nodes attempt to exchange messages and the conventional low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are implemented for error correction. In the proposed scheme, the ACK/NACK feedback information is transmitted along with the payload data by free-ride codes, while the re-transmitted codewords are superimposed (XORed) on the current codewords, both of which cost neither extra bandwidth nor transmission power. Firstly, we present a syndrome channel model and derive its capacity (referred to as accessible capacity) with a lower bound, implying that the reliable transmission of extra bits (feedback information) is possible. Then, the performance of the extra bits is analyzed by the dependency testing (DT) bound for the syndrome channels. Moreover, motivated by the DT bound, we present a low-complexity DT-like decoder for the free-ride codes. For the superposition retransmission, we present a practical implementation, where those unsuccessfully decoded codewords are sparsely interleaved and superimposed onto the current codewords. In addition, the presented transmission scheme is combined with the conventional hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocol, resulting in a throughput-enhanced conjunction HARQ scheme. Numerical results show that the word error rate (WER) of the LDPC codes can be significantly reduced by using the presented transmission scheme, but without any extra bandwidth or transmission power. They also show that the presented conjunction HARQ schemes can achieve a throughput improvement up to 80% over fading channels in comparison with the original 5G HARQ scheme.

Age-Optimal Network Coding HARQ Scheme for Satellite-Based Internet of Things

Satellite-based Internet of Things (S-IoT) is viewed as an efficient solution to provide timely status updates to the terrestrial user equipment (UE), due to its ubiquitous coverage and broadband access capability inherited from high throughput satellite (HTS). However, the conventional hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) cannot guarantee the freshness of status update transmission, because the reliable transmission needs the retransmission of the lost packets, which deteriorates the freshness due to the nontrivial propagation delay and high bit error rate (BER) of the satellite–territory link (STL). In this article, we propose an age-optimal network coding HARQ (NC HARQ) scheme with the metric of information timeliness, i.e., Age of Information (AoI) to realize timely status updates in S-IoT. First, we model the STL as a shadowed Rician (SR) fading channel and derive the closed-form expressions of BER. Then, we propose a fixed interval NC inserted HARQ (f-NC HARQ) scheme, where the NC packets are inserted in the information packets with fixed interval to accelerate the recovery of lost information packets and derive the expressions of Peak AoI (PAoI) and average end-to-end delay. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive NC inserted HARQ (A-NC HARQ) scheme for the drastic variations in the SR fading channel, where the transmission of the status update is modeled as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) problem and solved by a low complexity improved fast informed bound (iFIB) algorithm. Simulation results validate the accuracy of our theoretical derivations and show that the A-NC HARQ scheme can achieve the lowest PAoI and average end-to-end delay.

Nonorthogonal HARQ for URLLC: Design and Analysis

The fifth generation (5G) of mobile standards is expected to provide ultrareliability and low-latency communications (URLLC) for various applications and services, such as online gaming, wireless industrial control, augmented reality, and self driving cars. Meeting the contradictory requirements of URLLC, i.e., ultrareliability and low latency, is considered to be very challenging, especially in bandwidth-limited scenarios. Most communication strategies rely on the hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) to improve reliability at the expense of increased packet latency due to the retransmission of failing packets. To guarantee high reliability and very low latency simultaneously, we enhance the HARQ retransmission mechanism to achieve reliability with guaranteed packet-level latency and in-time delivery. The proposed nonorthogonal HARQ (N-HARQ) utilizes nonorthogonal sharing of time slots for conducting retransmission. The reliability and delay analysis of the proposed N-HARQ in the finite block length (FBL) regime shows very high performance gain in packet delivery delay over conventional HARQ in both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels. We also propose an optimization framework to further enhance the performance of N-HARQ for single and multiple retransmission cases.

On the Performance of HARQ Protocols With Blanking in NOMA Systems

In this paper, we investigate the throughput performance of single-packet and multi-packet hybrid-automatic repeat request (HARQ) with blanking for downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems. While conventional single-packet HARQ achieves high throughput at the expense of high latency, multi-packet HARQ, where several data packets are sent in the same channel block, can achieve high throughput with low latency. Previous works have shown that multi-packet HARQ outperforms single-packet HARQ in orthogonal multiple access (OMA) systems, especially in the moderate to high signal-to-noise ratio regime. This work amalgamates multi-packet HARQ with NOMA to achieve higher throughput than the conventional single-packet HARQ and OMA, which has been adopted in the legacy mobile networks. We conduct theoretical analysis for the throughput per user and also investigate the optimization of the power and rate allocations of the packets, in order to maximize the weighted-sum throughput. It is demonstrated that the gain of multi-packet HARQ over the single-packet HARQ in NOMA systems is reduced compared to that obtained in OMA systems due to inter-user interference. It is also shown that NOMA-HARQ cannot achieve any throughput gain with respect to OMA-HARQ when the error propagation rate of the NOMA detector is above a certain threshold.

Channel Constrained Multiple Selective Retransmissions for OFDM System: BER and Throughput Analysis

Hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) retransmission is an effective method to combat time-variant channel fading. Conventional HARQ methods initiate retransmission of failed packet without exploiting channel knowledge. When a packet fails, retransmission of data corresponding to high gain sub-carriers of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation is not necessary and deteriorates the throughput of the communication system. In this paper, we propose accumulated channel norm constrained selective retransmission (CNSR) at physical layer (PHY) in conjunction with HARQ method, which enhances throughput of the transceiver without compromising latency. When a packet fails, medium access control (MAC) layer requests retransmission of the failed packet. The proposed CNSR method initiates retransmission of data at PHY layer transmitted over low signal-to-noise ratio sub-carriers using outdated channel information. The transceiver pair continues retransmission of the failed packet until target channel norm of the sub-carriers is achieved or maximum number of retransmissions are completed. We maximize throughput by optimizing threshold on channel norm for OFDM modulation. We also present an upper bound on bit error rate and throughput analysis of the proposed method. The proposed method achieves higher throughput as compared with the existing Chase combining with selective repeat and conventional Chase combining schemes with and without forward error correction codes.

AMC and HARQ: How to Increase the Throughput

In this paper, we consider transmissions over block-fading channels and assume that adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) and hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) are implemented. Knowing that in high signal-to-noise ratio, the conventional combination of HARQ with AMC is counterproductive from the throughput point of view, we adopt the so-called layer-coded HARQ (L-HARQ). L-HARQ allows consecutive packets to share the channel and preserves a great degree of separation between AMC and HARQ; this makes the encoding and decoding very simple and allows us to use the available/optimized codes. Numerical examples shown in this paper indicate that L-HARQ can provide significant throughput gains compared to the conventional HARQ. The L-HARQ is also implemented using turbo codes, indicating that the throughput gains also materialize in practice.

Efficient Design of Multi-Packet Hybrid ARQ Transmission Scheme Based on Polar Codes

In this paper, a new polar coded hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) strategy combining multiple packets (MP) of transmission rounds is proposed to improve the throughput, which is called MP-HARQ. In our scheme, first, part of message bits in previous packet and the new source packet are jointly encoded in the retransmission round. Then, backtrack-freezing decoding is implemented at the receiver. To maximize throughput and achieve rate adaptation, we optimize the parameters of the proposed scheme by dynamic programming algorithm on the basis of estimated packet error rate and calculation of throughput. Finally, numerical simulation results suggest that the proposed three-level MP-HARQ could attain similar throughput to the conventional incremental redundancy HARQ of rate-compatible punctured polar codes (RCPP IR-HARQ) and ensure a significant gain over the HARQ scheme with Chase combining, using a low-complexity HARQ control and less transmission times in contrast to RCPP IR-HARQ.

How to Boost the Throughput of HARQ With Off-the-Shelf Codes

In this paper, we propose a coding strategy designed to enhance the throughput of hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) transmissions over independent identically distributed block-fading channels with the channel state information unknown at the transmitter. We use a joint packet coding where the same channel block is logically shared among many packets. To reduce the encoding and decoding complexity, we use a two-layer coding where, first, packets are punctured, mixed, and then passed to the conventional channel encoder. We show how to optimize the puncturing rates on the basis of the empirical error-rate curves. We also discuss how the parameters of the practical turbo-codes may be modified to take advantage of the proposed HARQ scheme. Finally, simple and pragmatic rate adaptation strategies are developed. In numerical examples, our scheme is compared with the conventional incremental redundancy HARQ (IR-HARQ), which remains a strategy of choice in the region of small throughput; however, our scheme shows a notable gain of $1-2~\textrm {dB}$ in the region of high throughput, where IR-HARQ fails to provide any improvement.

Rate Adaptive Hybrid ARQ With Optimal Spectral Efficiency and Delay Tradeoff

Hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) is widely used in modern wireless communication systems to improve the spectral efficiency. However, the spectral efficiency improvement is at the cost of increased transmission delay. In this paper, we first show that the gap between spectral efficiency of conventional HARQ and ergodic channel capacity diminishes as $\frac {1}{D}$ , where $D$ is the average delay of HARQ. It is then shown that rate optimized HARQ, which allows static resource allocation of each HARQ transmission, is capable of achieving marginally better spectral efficiency and delay tradeoff performance. We then consider rate adaptive HARQ, which allows dynamic resource allocation based on outdated CSI feedback information from the receiver. Under the assumption of the cumulative distribution function of the fading channel capacity being a power function, spectral efficiency of simple linear stationary policy converges to the ergodic channel capacity at order of $\frac {1}{D^{2}}$ . For a wide class of policies, the spectral efficiency can converge to ergodic channel capacity at order of $e^{-D}$ . The optimal policy can be found in a simple explicit form sequentially by a greedy algorithm. Simulation results show that it achieves significantly higher spectral efficiency than other existing schemes with the same average delay.

A Low-Latency Collaborative HARQ Scheme for Control/User-Plane Decoupled Railway Wireless Networks

The control/user (C/U) plane decoupled railway wireless network is an innovative architecture recently proposed to meet the communication demands of both train control systems and onboard passengers. The core idea is to completely separate the C-plane and the U-plane into different network nodes operating at different frequency bands. Although the system capacity of this network architecture can be highly increased, the forwarding latency of X3 interfaces to link the C-plane and the U-plane becomes a serious problem, particularly for hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocols that demand frequent interactions between the C-plane and the U-plane. To address this challenging problem, we propose a low-latency collaborative HARQ scheme in this paper. Specifically, we develop a new collaborative transmission framework where the possible spare resources on lower frequency bands of macrocells excluding those used by C-plane transmissions can be utilized to help small cells relay erroneously received data. Compared with the conventional HARQ scheme, the proposed scheme requires fewer retransmissions to reach the same transmission reliability, thereby mitigating the latency problem caused by HARQ retransmissions. Furthermore, channel mapping is also redesigned to conform to the proposed collaborative transmission framework. Through theoretical analysis, we derive the expression of the average number of retransmissions related to the sum of independent Gamma variables. Finally, the results of simulation experiments show that the proposed scheme can largely decrease the retransmission latency for railway wireless networks.

Energy Efficiency of Adaptive HARQ

In this work, various channel coding schemes that can be used in hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) transmission protocols are investigated from an energy efficiency point of view. Conventional HARQ, where only one bit is used to inform the transmitter about the decoding success or failure, is compared to adaptive HARQ where the transmitter adapts either the length or the transmit power of the codewords using outdated channel state information (i.e., experienced by the receiver during the past transmissions). Describing the problems within a Markov decision process framework, we find optimal adaptation policies for both persistent (unlimited number of transmission) and truncated HARQ protocols. Numerical examples obtained in a Rayleigh block fading channel show that, in terms of energy efficiency, the adaptation of the codewords length provides notable gains over power adaptation and conventional HARQ.

Effective interference level‐based packet transmission for multiple‐input multiple‐output systems with hybrid automatic repeat request

A packet transmission strategy for multiple-input multiple-output systems with interference cancellation detection and hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) processes is proposed. The error probability and throughput of such a system depend on the choice of the set of packets to be transmitted in each packet transmission time interval, but there are no existing implementable strategies to optimise such choice of packets. In this study, the authors first define a concept of the effective interference level (EIL) and establish the relationship between the EIL and the effective signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio. Then they show that choosing the set of packets that minimises the EIL successively from the lowest to the highest HARQ round leads to a lower packet error and higher system throughput than conventional HARQ, which is verified by simulation. Also, the proposed EIL-based scheme uses only the acknowledgement feedback messages like a conventional HARQ scheme, because the number of HARQ rounds of each packet is the only required information to calculate the EIL. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional scheme in terms of throughput with the signal-to-noise ratio gain of about 4.2 dB at maximum.

Multipacket Hybrid ARQ: Closing Gap to the Ergodic Capacity

In this work, we consider incremental redundancy (IR) hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ), where the transmission rounds are carried over independent block-fading channels. We analyze the multipacket HARQ, where the transmitter allows two different packets to share the same channel block; this stands in contrast with the conventional HARQ, where each packet occupies the entire block. We then optimally assign resources within the block to each packet and in each transmission round. We study superposition coding and time-sharing encoding strategies, and we optimize their parameters to maximize the throughput. Besides the conventional, one-bit (ACK/NACK) signaling we also consider a multibit feedback. We formulate our problem as a Markov decision process (MDP), where the decisions concerning the encoding strategies and their parameters are taken using additional information obtained from the receiver via feedback channel. In the case of the one-bit (ACK/NACK) signaling, the partial state information Markov decision process (PSI-MDP) framework is used to obtain the optimal policies. Numerical examples obtained in a Rayleigh-fading channel indicate that, the proposed multipacket HARQ outperforms the conventional one, by more than 5 dB for high-spectral efficiencies.

Energy efficient HARQ scheme for wireless communication over block fading channel

Energy efficiency (EE) can be enhanced by retransmissions and combining in hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) system. However, it is difficult to optimize the transmit power of each retransmission when the accurate retransmission number and future channel state information (CSI) cannot be obtained. This paper proposes a simple energy efficient HARQ scheme for point-to-point wireless communication. In the proposed scheme, the conditional word error rate (WER) of each retransmission is fixed and the transmit power is adapted Correspondingly. Three performance metrics are analyzed including average transmission number, throughput and EE. Compared with the conventional equal power HARQ scheme, the proposed scheme can significantly improve the EE and other two metrics under the same constraint of average transmit power or average energy consumption. Furthermore, it is found that, selecting a conditional WER which is slightly smaller than the optimal one is sufficient for practical implementation.

Bandwidth-Efficient Selective Retransmission for MIMO-OFDM Systems

In this work, we propose an efficient selective retransmission method for multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems under orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signaling. A typical received OFDM frame may have some symbols in error, which results in a retransmission of the entire frame. Such a retransmission is often unnecessary, and to avoid this, we propose a method to selectively retransmit symbols that correspond to poor-quality subcarriers. We use the condition numbers of the subcarrier channel matrices of the MIMO-OFDM system as a quality measure. The proposed scheme is embedded in the modulation layer and is independent of conventional hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) methods. The receiver integrates the original OFDM and the punctured retransmitted OFDM signals for more reliable detection. The targeted retransmission results in fewer negative acknowledgements from conventional HARQ algorithms, which results in increasing bandwidth and power efficiency. We investigate the efficacy of the proposed method for optimal and suboptimal receivers. The simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method on throughput for MIMO-OFDM systems.

Selective Chase combining for OSTB coded MIMO-OFDM system

We present a new selective retransmission method for orthogonal space-time block (OSTB) coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems at modulation layer. The proposed method is independent of the conventional hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) methods and improves throughput by selectively retransmitting of OSTB codes corresponding to the poor quality subcarriers. A typical failed packet has fewer corrupt bits and retransmission of partial packet can help receiver to recover from bit errors. Thus, the proposed method allows selective retransmission correspond to the poor quality subcarriers of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) OFDM system. The receiver performs Chase combining (joint detection) of retransmitted OSTB codes by combining observations from the first transmission (preserved before retransmission request) and ensuing selective retransmission. Due to the structure of the OSTB codes, we use ℓ2-norm of the MIMO channel matrix as a channel quality metric. We also present union bound on the bit-error rate (BER) for the proposed selective Chase combining (SCC) approach.

CRC-Free Hybrid ARQ System Using Turbo Product Codes

This paper presents a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) system using turbo product codes (TPC). The inherent word-error detection capability of TPC is exploited to replace the conventional cyclic redundancy check (CRC) used for packet error detection in conventional HARQ systems. Therefore, TPC are used for joint bit error correction and packet error detection. Consequently, the HARQ system efficiency is improved by increasing the system throughput when short packets are transmitted or by reducing the computational complexity/delay when the packets transmitted are long. Monte Carlo simulation results reveal that the CRC-free TPC-HARQ system consistently provides equivalent or higher throughput than CRC-based HARQ systems. Moreover, numerical results show that TPC self-detection has lower computational complexity than CRC detection, particularly for TPCs with high code rates. In particular scenarios, the relative complexity of the self-detection approach with respect to popular CRC techniques is about 0.3%.

Multiple retransmission strategy‐based HARQ for MIMO systems with acknowledgment bundling

A new hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) scheme is proposed for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems when the acknowledgment (ACK) bundling is applied for packet retransmissions. In the proposed HARQ scheme, both Chase combining (CC) and incremental redundancy (IR) are utilised for a retransmission request, and the proposed HARQ scheme is called a multiple retransmission strategy-based HARQ (MRS-HARQ). During the reception process of the MRS-HARQ, IR packets obtain signal-to-noise ratio gains using the extended detection with CC packets and the improved IR packets are utilised to eliminate the interference from the CC packets. This sequential reliability improvement allows the MRS-HARQ to decrease the occurrence of the deficient transmissions, and the proposed MRS-HARQ can achieve an improved error performance and throughput over the conventional CC-based and IR-based HARQ schemes with the ACK bundling.