Uncertainty Processing Applied to Packet Combining in MIMO-HARQ Systems

This paper proposes a novel receiver scheme for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with hybrid-automatic-retransmission-request (HARQ) mechanism. The proposed scheme improves the decoding performance by characterizing and counteracting uncertainty of the soft decisions. Furthermore, the proposed scheme can make full use of the received signals and especially performs well when the prior probability is unknown, as compared with the maximum likelihood (ML) approach. Simulation results under IEEE 802.16e setting with UMTS channel model verify that the proposed receiver scheme outperforms the ML approach and the other suboptimal receiver schemes.