Adaptive Hybrid ARQ System Using Turbo Product Codes with Hard/Soft Decoding

The bit error rate (BER) performance of turbo product codes (TPC) has been considered extensively in the literature. However, other performance metrics such as throughput can be more informative in particular systems. In this letter, the throughput performance of hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) is considered using TPC with iterative hard and soft decision decoding. Monte Carlo simulation and semi-analytical solutions are developed to evaluate the throughput of HARQ-TPC system for a wide selection of codes. The obtained results reveal that the coding gain advantage of the soft over hard decoding is reduced significantly when throughput is adopted as the performance metric, and it actually vanishes completely for some codes. When adaptive coding is used, the soft decoding advantage is limited to about 1.4 dB.