Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request Retransmissions Research Articles

Saving Energy and Spectrum in Enabling URLLC Services: A Scalable RL Solution

Communication systems supporting cyber-physical production applications should satisfy stringent delay and reliability requirements. Diversity techniques and power control are the main approaches to reduce latency and enhance the reliability of wireless communications at the expense of redundant transmissions and excessive resource usage. Focusing on the application layer reliability key performance indicators (KPIs), we design a deep reinforcement learning orchestrator for power control and hybrid automatic repeat request retransmissions to optimize these KPIs. Furthermore, to address the scalability issue that emerges in the per-device orchestration problem, we develop a new branching soft actor-critic framework in which a separate branch represents the action space of each industrial device. Our orchestrator enables near real-time control and can be implemented in the edge cloud. We test our solution with a 3GPP-compliant and realistic simulator for factory automation scenarios. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our solution offers significant scalability gains in terms of computational time and memory requirements. Our extensive experiments show significant improvements in our target KPIs, over the state-of-the-art, especially for 5th percentile user availability. To achieve these targets, our framework requires substantially less total energy or spectrum, thanks to our scalable RL solution.

Swift HARQ Based on Machine Learning for Latency Minimization in URLLC

Ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) has been introduced in the 5th Generation (5G) radios for mission-critical applications that demand strict reliability and latency traffic to guarantee the rapid delivery of short packets (up to 1 ms) with a success probability rate of 99.999%. The challenging reliability and latency requirements of URLLC have significant impact on the air-interface design, especially on the Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) mechanism. This study focuses on satisfying link latency requirements by reducing the delay that arises in the presence of the HARQ operation. To this end, we propose a Swift HARQ protocol empowered by machine learning techniques to estimate the decodability of a packet early enough within its maximum number of allowable retransmission attempts. This can allow the transmitter to react faster by dropping the non-decodable packets, or activating the repetition mode where parts of the HARQ feedback can be omitted. As shown through system-level simulations, the proposed model achieves a delay reduction of more than 50% compared to the traditional HARQ, and increases the system throughput by up to 40% when multiple HARQ retransmissions are required.

Power Allocation for Reliable and Energy-Efficient Optical LEO-to-Ground Downlinks with Hybrid ARQ Schemes

Satellites in low earth orbit (LEO) are currently being deployed for numerous communication, positioning, space and Earth-imaging missions. To provide higher data rates in direct-to-user links and earth observation downlinks, the free-space optics technology can be employed for LEO-to-ground downlinks. Moreover, the hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) can be adopted since the propagation latency is low for LEO satellites. In this work, a power allocation methodology is proposed for optical LEO-to-ground downlinks under weak turbulence employing HARQ retransmission schemes. Specifically, the average power consumption is minimized given a maximum transmitted power constraint and a target outage probability threshold to ensure energy efficiency and reliability, respectively. The optimization problem is formulated as a constrained nonlinear programming problem and solved for Type I HARQ, chase combining (CC) and incremental redundancy (IR) schemes. The solutions are derived numerically via iterative algorithms, namely interior-point (IP) and sequential quadratic programming (SQP), and validated through an exhaustive (brute-force) search. The numerical simulations provide insight into the performance of the retransmission schemes regarding average power. More specifically, Type I HARQ has the worst output, CC has a moderate one, and IR exhibits the best performance. Finally, the IP algorithm is a slower but more accurate solver, and SQP is faster but slightly less accurate.

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.

Improved calendar disc scheduler for LTE advanced networks with HARQ

Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) is a broadband wireless technology that supports variety of services with different data rate. In order to achieve this the evolved Node B (eNB) uses different features provided in the 3GPP standards. Features like Carrier Aggregation (CA), Multiple input and Multiple output (MIMO) and Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) help to increase the throughput and spectral efficiency. In this paper, a novel two-level calendar disc algorithm with HARQ is introduced at the eNB for effectively scheduling real time and non-real time traffic with different service types. The algorithm also uses a burst profile management module that analyzes the current user profile and notifies the scheduler about the need to change in profile based on power boosting. The Calendar Disc Scheduler (CDS) is improved by adding HARQ retransmission index as a parameter in calculating the metric weight. The scheduler was tested for both adaptive and non-adaptive methods of HARQ in both synchronous and asynchronous modes. The proposed improved CDS scheduler was simulated with LTESim simulator and compared with calendar disc algorithm without HARQ improvements. Results show that the proposed scheduling method provides increased performance in terms of goodput, delay and spectral efficiency.

Reduction of HARQ Latency for URLLC 5G Services Based on Network Slicing and Massive MIMO Hybrid Beamforming

Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) is one of the three generic 5G services and probably the most challenging one, with strict quality of service requirements of 99.999% or more reliability and less than 1 milliseconds (ms) radio latency. To achieve latency targets, contributors to latency need to be addressed. Hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) retransmissions are major contributor to latency and need to be limited. The objective of this paper is to study the benefit of using Massive MIMO (M-MIMIO) along with radio network slicing to reduce number of HARQ retransmissions. A practical type of M-MIMO beamforming named hybrid beamforming is used. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated with slicing, without slicing and by alternating number of data streams per user. This work highlights the importance of technology enablers, such as M-MIMO and network slicing, in addressing quality-of-service (QoS) latency requirements for URLLC applications.

Ad Hoc LTE Method for Resilient Smart Grid Communications

LTE network is a good choice for delivering smart grid demand response (DR) traffic. However, LTE connectivity is not pervasively available due to smart meter improper positioning, limited of coverage, or base station software or hardware failures. In this paper, a solution is introduced to overcome issues relating to lack of LTE base station connectivity for user equipment (UE) considered as remote terminal units, i.e. communication interfaces connected to smart meters. The solution is an ad hoc mode for the LTE-Advanced UE. The ad hoc mode is applied to reach a relay node that is the nearest UE with base station connection. DR traffic is delivered between clusters of UEs and a relay node using multi-hop communications. Analytical Markov chain models and a Riverbed Modeler network simulation model are implemented to illustrate the functionalities and the performance when DR traffic is delivered with varying transmission power levels. A detailed physical layer propagation model for device-to-device communications, a static resource allocation in time domain, hybrid automatic repeat request retransmissions, and a capability for a UE to receive uplink transmissions are modeled both analytically and in the simulator. Both the disjoint analysis and simulations show that all packets are successfully transmitted at most with the fourth transmission attempt and the average network delay is low enough to support most of the smart grid DR applications (139.2–546.6 ms).

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.

Cross-Layer Chase Combining With Selective Retransmission, Analysis, and Throughput Optimization for OFDM Systems

In this paper, we present a bandwidth efficient retransmission method employing selective retransmission approach at a modulation layer under orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signaling. The proposed cross-layer design embeds a selective retransmission sub-layer in physical layer (PHY) that targets the retransmission of information symbols transmitted over poor quality OFDM sub-carriers. Most of the times, a few errors in decoded bit stream result in packet failure at medium access control (MAC) layer. The unnecessary retransmission of good quality information symbols of a failed packet has detrimental effect on the overall throughput of transceiver. We propose a cross-layer Chase combining with selective retransmission (CCSR) method by blending Chase combining approach at MAC layer and selective retransmission in PHY. The selective retransmission in PHY targets the poor quality information symbols prior to decoding, which results in lower hybrid automatic repeat reQuest retransmissions at MAC layer. We also present bit-error rate upper bound and throughput lower bound for the CCSR method. In order to maximize the throughput, we formulate optimization problem with respect to the amount of information to be retransmitted in selective retransmission. We also present an impact of selective retransmission on latency. The proposed CCSR method achieves a significant throughput gain as compared with the conventional Chase combining method.

Diversity Integration in Hybrid-ARQ With Chase Combining Under Partial CSI

We consider a receiver design for a Hybrid Automatic-Repeat-reQuest (HARQ) system protected by polar codes against transmission errors. This integrated detection–decoding receiver targets a packet link for which channel state information during HARQ retransmission is unavailable at the receiver. Under such channel uncertainties, we propose a second-order cone programming (SOCP) approach for diversity combining without resorting to decision-directed channel estimation prone to error propagation. We formulate an integrated SOCP receiver by jointly exploiting the constraints from diversity channel models, subspace separation, and forward error correction codes. Unlike traditional turbo receiver algorithms that require iterative exchange of soft information between detector and decoder, our proposed SOCP receiver solves as a single-integrated convex optimization problem. This formulation is also versatile and extendable to a plurality of practical scenarios. We further investigate the means for enhancing the receiver performance and the HARQ throughput. Numerical results demonstrate the substantial performance benefits of the proposed joint SOCP receiver.

Fast Shared Feedback Methods for Uplink CoMP with H-ARQ

An efficient direct feedback method from coordinated base stations (BSs) to a mobile station (MS) for an uplink (UL) coordinated multipoint (CoMP) reception with supporting hybrid automatic-repeat-request (H-ARQ) transmission is proposed. Acknowledgement (ACK)/negative acknowledgement (NACK) feedback based on local detection at each BS in the CoMP set is directly transmitted from the BSs using shared-feedback resources. Therefore, an MS can obtain global ACK/NACK information without experiencing extra backhaul delay with a small feedback overhead, and we can reduce the H-ARQ retransmission latency for the inter-cell UL-CoMP operation. To minimize the ACK/NACK detection error at the MS, we investigate the optimized design methods for shared-feedback resources. We derived the analytical detection error probability of the proposed feedback method and the optimum sub-block size to minimize misdetection probability for a fixed overhead and false alarm rate. Based on the analytical and computer simulation results, we have verified that the proposed feedback method can provide a reliable detection performance with a small feedback overhead. In addition, system level simulation results show the proposed fast feedback based inter-cell UL-CoMP system increases the system throughput compared to the conventional intra-cell UL-CoMP without increasing the feedback latency.

Piggyback Retransmissions over Wireless MIMO Channels: Shared Hybrid-ARQ (SHARQ) for Bandwidth Efficiency

Hybrid ARQ transmissions are effective means for on-demand error correction in wireless networks against unpredictable channel distortions and interferences. By requesting retransmission of failed data packets upon detecting packet errors, receivers can integrate original and retransmitted packet signals for more effective packet detection and error correction. Often, only a small fraction of the packet bits is in error. For channels with sufficiently high capacity such as in MIMO wireless systems, it is typically unnecessary to reuse the entire channel for hybrid-ARQ retransmissions in order to correct the few remaining errors. To improve the wireless channel utility, we propose and investigate a shared hybrid ARQ (SHARQ) mechanism in MIMO systems where failed data can piggyback on new data frames over the diversity MIMO channel. To guarantee certain quality of HARQ retransmission, we design a linear transmit precoder based on channel state information at the transmitter and receiver to achieve a predetermined {minimum} signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain for the SHARQ signals by minimizing the transmission power. Our proposed SHARQ system takes advantage of a simple successive interference cancellation receiver to facilitate a simpler and better transmitter.

Performance analysis of VoIP services in mobile WiMAX systems with a hybrid ARQ scheme

This paper analyzes the performance of voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) services in terms of the system throughput, the packet delay, and the signaling overhead in a mobile WiMAX system with a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) mechanism. Furthermore, a queueing analytical model is developed with due consideration of adaptive modulation and coding, the signaling overhead, and the retransmissions of erroneous packets. The arrival process is modeled as the sum of the arrival rate at the initial transmission queue and the retransmission queue, respectively. The service rate is calculated by taking the HARQ retransmissions into consideration. This paper also evaluates the performance of VoIP services in a mobile WiMAX system with and without persistent allocation; persistent allocation is a technique used to reduce the signaling overhead for connections with a periodic traffic pattern and a relatively fixed payload. As shown in the simulation results, the HARQ mechanism increases the system throughput as well as the signaling overhead and the packet delay.

Performance Analysis for Superposition Modulated Cooperative Relay HARQ Networks

In this paper, a two-user superposition modulated cooperative relay hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) system is proposed. Two mobile station (MS) uplink communications to the base station (BS) with cooperative assistance of a relay station (RS) are considered. The RS is assumed to be able to perfectly monitor and decode the two MS-to-BS transmitted packets and assist the two MSs by immediately transmitting a cooperative superposition modulated packet that combines the two MS generated packets in the analog domain. The BS is assumed to have perfect channel statistical information and can feed back the appropriate superposition weighting factor to the RS regularly. The HARQ retransmissions, if needed, are then jointly performed by the RS for both MSs instead of separately for each MS. The superposition of the modulated packets is repeatedly retransmitted by the RS to the BS if needed. With the foregoing setting, we derive an information-theoretic achievable rate region and an approximation of the system outage probability. Based on the high SNR behaviors of the approximated system outage probability, we obtain the superposition weighting factor using a simple and efficient searching algorithm. We also analytically derive the HARQ system throughput as the performance metric for comparison. Compared with the traditional relaying HARQ system, our proposed scheme exhibits more than 30% gain in terms of system throughput, depending on the fading statistics of the RS-to-BS and MS-to-BS channels.

Optimized Power Allocation for Packet Retransmissions of Non-Gaussian Inputs Through Sequential AWGN Channels

This work investigates the optimization of power allocation for hybrid-ARQ (H-ARQ) retransmissions of non-Gaussian inputs over a bank of independent parallel Gaussian channels. We establish a general solution for maximizing generic transceiver objective utility functions that are monotonically non-decreasing and concave function with respect to the accumulated signal to noise ratio (SNR). Specifically, we investigate optimized solutions under two performance metrics, namely, the mutual information (MI) and the union bound of symbol error rate (UBSER) under maximal ratio combining (MRC) reception. We establish that efficient utilization of parallel channels in H-ARQ retransmissions requires sequential updating of signal-channel pairing as well as optimizing power allocation. Applying geometric analysis of power loading for H-ARQ retransmission, we show that for i.i.d. inputs that are not necessarily Gaussian, the optimum pairing policy should match signals of the lowest cumulative signal-to-noise ratio with channels of the best quality in each transmission, which is consistent with a similar result of , for Gaussian input signals. We further propose a generalized mercury/waterfilling algorithm for the optimal power assignment problem in H-ARQ. Simulation results illustrate substantial improvements over designs based on Gaussian input assumptions.

Sequential Linear MIMO Precoder Optimization for Hybrid ARQ Retransmission of QAM Signals

Our investigation centers on the issue of linear precoding for hybrid-ARQ retransmissions in linear multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) channels driven by non-Gaussian inputs. Leveraging recent works on single transmission MIMO precoding , we derive the gradient of input-output mutual information with respect to precoder matrix for optimization. We further establish that the right eigenvectors of optimum precoder are determined by the associated minimum mean-square error (MMSE) matrix. We then propose a gradient algorithm for maximizing the mutual information. Compared with precoders designed for Gaussian input, our new precoders can significantly improve the input-output mutual information, especially at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and for lower dimensional constellations.

Optimal Rate Selection for Persistent Scheduling with HARQ in Time-Correlated Nakagami-m Fading Channels

Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, such as IEEE 802.16e/m and 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE), require significantly large signaling overhead for delivering small-sized delay-sensitive traffic such as voice over IP (VoIP) service. It may result in a significant decrease in the spectral efficiency. In order to overcome this drawback, recently, a persistent scheduling scheme has been standardized in standard bodies. In order to reduce the signaling overhead, the modulation and coding scheme (MCS) is set to be fixed during a burst period for the persistent scheduling procedure and an incomplete transmission, if it occurs, is recovered by a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) scheme. In this paper, considering the HARQ retransmissions, we propose a rate selection scheme for the persistent scheduling satisfying given quality of service (QoS) requirements. In our proposed rate selection scheme, we consider two important factors which were not considered in previous HARQ-related work: time-correlations of the wireless channel in the HARQ retransmissions and the resource usage of signaling overhead. Numerical results show that the proposed rate selection scheme can efficiently enhance the utilization of radio resources compared to the conventional schemes.

Virtually Dedicated Resource Allocation for VoIP Traffic in the Downlink Mobile WiMAX System With Hybrid ARQ

This paper introduces the concept of a virtually dedicated resource allocation (VDRA) scheme that significantly reduces signaling overhead for accommodating low/medium data traffic, including real-time VoIP traffic. The basic concept of the VDRA scheme is to allocate the virtually dedicated resource to each user and to use the resource only when there are data to be transmitted. The performance of the proposed VDRA scheme in downlink is analyzed using a queuing system with hybrid automatic repeat request retransmissions to derive the distribution of packet delay and user capacity. In addition, the analytical results are verified through simulation results. The performance of the proposed VDRA scheme is compared with the persistent allocation scheme and the dynamic scheduling scheme. The proposed VDRA scheme yields a 15%-28% increase in user capacity and a 26%-69% decrease in the size of signaling overhead compared with the dynamic scheduling scheme. The proposed VDRA scheme yields slightly better performance in terms of user capacity and signaling overhead than the persistent allocation scheme for accommodating even voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) traffic. In addition, the proposed VDRA scheme yields much smaller mean packet delay performance than the persistent allocation scheme. Moreover, the application of the persistent allocation (PA) scheme is limited to only real-time periodic VoIP traffic. On the other hand, the applicability of the proposed VDRA scheme is much wider than the PA scheme, including periodic and nonperiodic traffic, as well as real-time and non-real-time traffic, because the proposed VDRA scheme requires no constraint to the input traffic.

Adaptive error control for nanometer scale network-on-chip links

The authors present an adaptive error control method for switch-to-switch links in nanoscale networks-on-chip to manage reliability, throughput and energy. Unlike previous works, the proposed method adjusts both error detection and correction simultaneously at runtime. For a given application or predicted noise scenario, an appropriate error control scheme is selected for reliable message transmission. When link conditions degrade, more powerful error detection and correction are temporarily provided to recover the previous message. To achieve this adaptation, the authors create a configurable M-error correction, 2M-error detection code, combined with a hybrid automatic repeat request retransmission policy. Simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce residual flit error rate by over three orders of magnitude and achieve up to 75% higher average throughput compared to other error control methods. Further, average energy per successfully transmitted flit is reduced by up to 15% compared to fixed error control in a 65-nm technology. Compared to a recent adaptive error detection method, a 34% energy reduction can be achieved in high noise environment, at the expense of moderate area overhead.