Novel reliability-based hybrid ARQ technique

In this paper we propose a novel technique for hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) systems where turbo codes are used as the forward error correction (FEC) techniques. This technique uses the histogram of the soft values generated by the turbo decoder to control the size and the contents of the retransmissions needed when the packet can not be decoded correctly. These soft values represent the reliabilities of the information bits; hence the proposed technique is a reliability-based (RB) HARQ technique. The proposed technique is compared to the conventional RB-HARQ and the conventional rate compatible punctured turbo (RCPT) codes, and is shown to achieve higher throughput and/or less number of transmissions.