The maximum achievable throughput of a decode-and-forward based hybrid-ARQ protocol

Cooperative hybrid-ARQ (HARQ) protocols have been widely studied because they are more efficient than cooperative protocols without HARQ. In, the throughput of a cooperative HARQ protocol based on the decode-and-forward protocol (DF-HARQ) is obtained. In this paper, the maximum achievable throughput of the DF-HARQ protocol is obtained using the asymptotic outage probability when the maximum number of transmission (M) goes to infinity. The range of the optimum worst-case coding rate (R) of the maximum achievable throughput is also obtained. Furthermore, we can expect that the methodology for obtaining the maximum achievable throughput in this paper also applicable to other cooperative HARQ protocols.