Hybrid Automatic Retransmission Request Protocol Research Articles

Performance Analysis and Comparison of HARQ Protocols Based on Outage Probability in Wireless Communication Networks

Hybrid Automatic Retransmission reQuest (HARQ) protocol can effectively compensate the signal transmission error caused by complex time-varying channels and multi-path effects of wireless communication networks. This paper analyzes and compares the principle and system performance of three HARQ protocols from the perspective of system outage probability, and the expressions of system throughput and energy efficiency are derived by establishing a one-dimensional Discrete Time Markov Chain (DTMC) and calculating the steady-state distribution. MATLAB numerical simulations are applied to evaluate and compare the performance superiority among three HARQ Protocols.

OM2DNC: Opportunistic Max2-Degree Network Coding for wireless data broadcasting

In wireless broadcasting systems, multiple retransmissions are commonly employed to guarantee the correct reception of each packet. The traditional hybrid automatic retransmission request protocol retransmits one packet per slot. Hence, a large amount of retransmissions is required to correctly receive all the packets, which leads to low spectrum efficiency. In this paper, we propose an Opportunistic Max2-Degree Network Coding (OM2DNC) based wireless broadcasting (WBC) protocol. Specifically, to reduce the overall number of retransmissions, lost packets of different user equipments (UEs) are combined by performing Max-Degree network coding (NC) at the access node. Then, NC combined packets are broadcasted by utilizing the Max-Degree based opportunistic retransmission protocol. At each UE, the lost packet can be recovered by using the proposed joint network recursive systematic convolution decoder. Theoretical analyses and simulation results show that the average number of transmissions performance of the proposed OM2DNC based WBC protocol outperforms that of the traditional NC based WBC protocols.

Rate Adaptation for Incremental Redundancy Secure HARQ

This paper studies secure communication based on incremental redundancy (INR) secure hybrid automatic retransmission request (HARQ) protocol over block-fading wiretap channels. The transmitter has no instantaneous channel state information (CSI) available from either main channel or the eavesdropper channel, hence the coding rates cannot be adapted to instantaneous channel conditions. We investigate the outage performance for two schemes of INR secure HARQ protocols: case 1) when there exists two reliable multibit feedback channels from both legitimate receiver and eavesdropper to the transmitter carrying a function of outdated CSI, and case 2) when there is a multibit feedback channel only from legitimate receiver. In both cases, we demonstrate that using the information carried via multibit feedback channels, the transmitter can adapt the coding rates in order to achieve a better secrecy throughput using a smaller number of transmissions comparing to the ACK/NACK feedback channel model. For some parameters, our rate adaptation protocol achieves a strictly positive secrecy throughput whereas it is equal to zero for the protocol with ACK/NACK feedback. We show that for some set of parameters, the loss of secrecy throughput between case 1 and case 2 is very small compared to the gain provided by both protocols.

NTC-HARQ: Network–Turbo-Coding Based HARQ Protocol for Wireless Broadcasting System

Wireless broadcasting systems employ multiple retransmissions to guarantee the correct reception of each packet. The traditional hybrid automatic retransmission request (HARQ) protocol retransmits one packet per slot. Hence, a large amount of retransmissions is required to correctly receive all the packets, which leads to low spectrum efficiency. In this paper, we propose a Network-coding-and-distributed-Turbo-Coding-based type-III HARQ (NTC-HARQ) protocol, including an xoring Network Coding Combined (XNCC) retransmission strategy at the access node (AN) and a joint network-turbo decoding (JNTD) strategy at the user equipment (UE). Specifically, to reduce the overall number of retransmissions, lost packets of different UEs are network coding (NC) combined at the AN by utilizing the XNCC strategy. The soft information of the lost packet at each UE can be recovered from the received network-coded retransmission packet by using the proposed xoring soft network decoder. The recovered soft information of the UE's lost packet is combined with the local undecodable soft information of the same packet to form a distributed turbo code. A Chase-combining-based distributed turbo decoder is proposed to perform turbo decoding, which introduces coding gain and improves packet-error-rate (PER) performance. Theoretical analyses and simulation results show that the average-number-of-transmission performance of the proposed NTC-HARQ protocol outperforms that of the XNCC-based type-I HARQ protocol, the traditional NC-based HARQ protocol, and the JNTD-based protocol.

N-in-1 Retransmission with Network Coding

Retransmission (ReTX) mechanisms, i.e. Automatic Retransmission reQuest (ARQ) protocols are widely used for error control in mobile communications. Using ARQ, corrupted data frames are retransmitted in several attempts for eventual error recovery at the receiver. Error correction coding and soft combining have also been used in Hybrid ARQ (HARQ) protocols to increase efficiency. However, the evolution of ARQ protocols to date has been limited to the paradigm of ONE ReTX attempt for (the recovery of) ONE data frame, which often leads to excessive redundancies. In this paper we propose a new N-in-1 ReTX scheme. Using Random Network Coding, the scheme further improves the efficiency of ReTX by transforming a data frame into a series of equally-useful blocks for error recovery and sharing every ReTX attempt among multiple frames. Results from extensive simulations show that the proposed scheme achieves a significant throughput gain of up to 106% against the conventional HARQ-CC protocol.

Cooperative HARQ protocol and diversity analysis of systems with multiple incremental relays

Wireless networks contain an inherent distributed spatial diversity that can be exploited by relays. Relay networks can take advantage of the broadcast-oriented nature of wireless transmission, but require more radio resource to transmit data for their multi-hop traits. Fortunately, incremental relaying technique, which can choose direct or multi-hop transmission adaptively, can efficiently utilize resource. In this article, the incremental transmission with amplify-and-forward (AF) relays is focused on. A practical hybrid-automatic retransmission request (HARQ) protocol is designed, and the related optimal relay selection strategy is proposed. To analyze the cooperative diversity of system with the proposed protocol, the capacity lower bound is deduced. Simulation and analytical results indicate that by adopting the optimal relay selection strategy, the system with the proposed HARQ protocol can achieve an order of cooperative diversity that equals the aggregated number of the relay and source nodes.

On the Throughput of Secure Hybrid-ARQ Protocols for Gaussian Block-Fading Channels

The focus of this paper is an information-theoretic study of retransmission protocols for reliable packet communication under a secrecy constraint. The hybrid automatic retransmission request (HARQ) protocol is revisited for a block-fading wire-tap channel, in which two legitimate users communicate over a block-fading channel in the presence of a passive eavesdropper who intercepts the transmissions through an independent block-fading channel. In this model, the transmitter obtains a 1-bit ACK/NACK feedback from the legitimate receiver via an error-free public channel. Both reliability and confidentiality of secure HARQ protocols are studied by the joint consideration of channel coding, secrecy coding, and retransmission protocols. In particular, the error and secrecy performance of repetition time diversity (RTD) and incremental redundancy (INR) protocols are investigated based on good Wyner code sequences, which ensure that the confidential message is decoded successfully by the legitimate receiver and is kept in total ignorance by the eavesdropper for a given set of channel realizations. This paper first illustrates that there exists a good rate-compatible Wyner code family which ensures a secure INR protocol. Next, two types of outage probabilities, connection outage and secrecy outage probabilities are defined in order to characterize the tradeoff between the reliability of the legitimate communication link and the confidentiality with respect to the eavesdropper's link. For a given connection/secrecy outage probability pair, an achievable throughput of secure HARQ protocols is derived for block-fading channels. Finally, both asymptotic analysis and numerical computations demonstrate the benefits of HARQ protocols to throughput and secrecy.